The Morning After: Reflections on the Certified Flash MX 2004 Developer exam

Posted December 10, 2004 4:28 pm
Filed under: ActionScript, Articles by Paul, Book reviews, Flash, Opinions

Yesterday I took (and passed) the Certified Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Developer exam. Since I know a few people who are thinking about taking the exam, I thought I would share some of the concerns and uncertainties I had going into the exam and how they played out (or didn’t) in the exam.

Disclaimer: part of taking the exam requires accepting a non-disclosure agreement about the questions (and perhaps the material) on the exam. I am going to do my best to be vague and general, while still providing some useful information. If someone from Macromedia reads this (although I don’t really expect that!) and feels like I am pushing the limits of the NDA, please let me know and I will try to revise this accordingly.

Question difficulty (compared to the exam prep book)

The biggest question/concern I had going into the exam was on the difficulty of the questions. I have a copy of the exam prep book and spent some time each week for the last 2-3 months working through it. My feeling was that the sample questions in the book weren’t too difficult and that if the real questions match that difficulty level, then I should be fine. On the other hand, in the Amazon.com page for the book, a few reviewers mentioned that the sample questions in the book are not nearly as difficult as the real questions on the exam — in which case I thought I might have some cause for concern.

Overall, I felt like the level of difficulty of the sample questions in the book in terms of depth of knowledge required is very consistent with the real exam. What may cause people difficulty is that the breadth of coverage in the real exam is much larger that the breadth of coverage in the sample questions (but not in the book itself). So (hypothetically) a particular chapter may have 5 sample questions, mostly specific to one aspect of the chapter which comprises about 20 - 25% of the total material covered in the chapter. That could be interpreted as meaning that only that 20-25% of the chapter is actually on the exam. In fact, on an exam you may see questions about 80-100% of the material in that chapter, but none of the questions will demand more expertise about their particular area than the sample questions in the book did. (The one exception to this is what I call the “silly” questions, which I will talk about further below.) This is my own speculation, of course, based on the assumption that there is a large pool of exam questions from which some are randomly chosen for each exam.

Topics not covered as in-depth as I expected

My next area of concern was simply with the topics I was less familiar with. For example, the exam prep book spends several chapters on topics like XML, the web services classes, components, Flash Remoting, and other topics that aren’t used as often by Flash developers, including me. I have actually done quite a bit of Flash/server connection type of projects, so I have studied the different approaches and their advantages and disadvantages, but just because of availability, there are some of these that I have worked with a lot and some I haven’t worked with as much.

For example, I spent a lot of time in the two days before the exam just reading through each item in the Components Dictionary and the ActionScript Language Reference (ActionScript Dictionary). I feel like that particular part of my preparation was somewhat wasted. In the randomly chosen questions for my exam, there were several that covered conceptual issues surrounding the topic of communicating between a Flash movie and server resources, but I don’t remember actually having any code examples that I had to work through. The questions I got that dealt with components were similar. I can honestly say that there are literally whole chapters in the book that I didn’t get any questions on. I assume there are some questions on those topics, but the random choice of the test just didn’t give them to me.

Thinking back, there is some logic to this. As I worked through the exam prep book I got a pretty good idea of when the book and exam were written — my guess is that it was at the latest during the early beta stages of Flash MX 2004 development. The book has some vagueness (and some inaccuracies) regarding some of these topics, and also especially with AS2 object-oriented programming. It makes sense that those aspects of the ActionScript language and the Flash authoring tool were not fully fleshed out and debugged at the time the book was written. Consequently, it makes sense that on the exam, the questions could only cover those topics conceptually rather than asking about syntax or implementation specifics.

So in summary, I guess I had certain expectations about the exam from the prep book, some of which worked out and some of which led to surprises. If you want more specific details on my thoughts about the book, you can see my comment on the Amazon.com page for the book.

Complaints about the exam

I guess I’m not ending on a positive note, but that’s life, isn’t it =).

There were probably five or so questions that I just call the silly questions. They all had a code listing and would ask you something about the output or result of executing the code. In each case, I always wanted to say “choice e: I wouldn’t write my code in such a messy, confusing, ambiguous way so I wouldn’t ever have to be concerned about what the output might be.” As you may gather, I felt that in those questions the code was intentionally written poorly, and the true best solution in that case would just be to rewrite the code to, for example, check for a certain condition rather than letting the code just work itself out. I know I’m being vague here, but I can’t rightfully give any more details without compromising actual test questions.

Note: I don’t feel this way about all the questions that involved looking at code listings and predicting the output — just a particular few.

Last recommendations

Okay, I will end on a positive note. Here are a couple of areas which I thought received lots of attention in the exam. I was familiar and comfortable with them, which was good for me, but if you aren’t you will definitely want to make sure your studies include these:

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4 Comments so far

  1. April 8th, 2005 at 8:20 pm
    noelbon70 is reported to have said:

    Hi: I was wondering what kind of impact having passed the exam has had on your careeer so far? Are you a freelancer / small biz? Has there been a perceivable benefit? As a freelancer / contractor / small biz, I’m wondering how the credentials would affect my business. Obviously, it can’t hurt, but I’m also wondering if it would help in an area where Flash development is competitive.

    What kind of impact do you hope to see, if none has happened so far? What is your honest assessment of Flash in terms of business, going forward into the future. Does Flex threaten things? Non-google-ability (search in general)? What aspect of Flash development do you see as most needed in the coming years?

    Thx!

  2. April 11th, 2005 at 12:40 pm
    Paul Robertson is reported to have said:

    I replied via email to all the questions you asked, but I also wanted to reply to the exam-related questions here, since others may wonder the same thing (I certainly wondered — and still do at times — about the value of the certification.

    —————————————

    Unfortunately I can’t say that passing the exam has had a quick financial impact for me. I definitely think it has been a benefit in terms of lending credibility to claims of knowing ActionScript — I have had a few situations since then where I was asked about my experience as a Flash developer, and in each case being able to say that I am a certified developer seemed to draw a favorable response.

    I am not a freelancer, so again I can’t really say how it affects the ability to attract clients. Frankly, many of the “big name” Flash developers do not have the developer certification, and my impression is that a strong portfolio and networking/connections are probably more important in that regard than certification. I know of one company (MediaRain) which is more in the small business range that you are looking at, and they have at least two employees who have passed the certified developer exam fairly recently (Josh Buhler and Nathan Garza). Since I get the impression that their company sees some value in the certification, they might be able to give you a better idea of what value they have gotten from it.

  3. April 18th, 2005 at 6:18 pm
    Nathan’s Razor » How to prepare for The Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Developer certification exam is reported to have said:

    […] gh he didn’t have much on components, he got quite a few questions about debugging. Paul Robertson mentioned on his site that when he took the exam there wasn’t […]

  4. July 2nd, 2005 at 7:49 am
    mambe churchill is reported to have said:

    yeah I am impressed about the general idea cos i plan to take the exam in august( next month), I have don much studies on my own but in practicals not realy much, I do OOP, and I have read essential AS 2.0 collin mock, but my problem is I havent workeed wiht remoting and componets been workin with loadvars and xml, so i dont know what u will advice me to do, if those areas are very much necessary. I will appreciate any online prep sites thanks

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