The World According to Mitch

Following the class that I was teaching one night this week I got up from my desk and sidled over to my kitchen table. I had an appointment to take a certification exam at 10:00pm, and it was nearly time to log on.

Nearly, but not quite time. I had a discussion with some of my students about the pros and cons of choosing the at home, on-line proctored exam experience. It is a subject I can go into with confidence in my experience for both sides – at-home versus in-person, and I have experienced both the pros and the cons of both. In fact, I have written several articles about the exam experience, including one about preparing your home environment for them; I decided, since I had a few minutes before I could officially log into the exam session, to go looking for it. I found the article titled Online Certification Exams – Are they worth it? which I published in June of last year.

Two things struck me as interesting as I scrolled through it. The first was how similar my desk is eight months later; the second was how similarly I my test desk was.

The only difference from last year to last night is that the chairs were reversed, and the side of the table is not folded down. The reason for that is because for an exam I sat last week the proctor wanted me to sit there instead of where it is set up now, and I just had not folded it down yet.

It’s a strange coincidence that the exam I had just taken when I took the picture a year ago was AI-900, and this week it was AB-900… two foundation-level exams from Microsoft, essentially bookends to nine exams I took in between… eight of which were orders of magnitude harder.

We all have our own preferences, but in the balance as long as I have a stable Internet connection, I would rather sit the exams at home. Not only does that allow me to avoid weather, traffic, and parking issues, but it also allows me to schedule the exams for odd hours – the last two that I sat were at 5:30am and 10:00pm respectively. I also live alone, and my dog will not bother me.

Will it always be at that table? Likely not… but given the chance they will always be at home.