10/1/2003 -- November 26 is the day that CompTIA’s new A+ exams based on the 2003 objectives will go live.

Unless you’re a movie producer trying to squeeze as much into a “weekend” as you can, I’m not sure why anyone would choose to release something on this Wednesday, the day before the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving. As interesting as the visions possible answers conjure up, there are many other things about these exams that I’m not sure, and I wonder how it is that enlightenment continues to elude me.

Among the questions that I have are the following:

What Purpose Do the Server+ and Network+ Exams Now Serve?
If you look at the updates that were made to the A+ Hardware exam (one of two you must take to become A+ certified), you’ll find that most of the material added to the objectives has been pulled from these other two exams. Interestingly enough, the recommended amount of experience that you should have has changed from the old A+ exams to the new. For the old exams, six months of hands-on experience was recommended, but for the new exams this has been changed to 500-hours. How do you expect someone to know all about SCSI and networking (the topics pulled from the other two exams and added to this one) as well as the basics of PC hardware in only 500 hours?

Are the Exams Really Current?
The OS exam (the other one you have to take for certification) has had questions on Windows NT/XP and Windows ME added to it. The fact that Windows ME has been added is very interesting since the vendor behind it, Microsoft, almost universally recommends changing the operating system to Windows XP as the solution for every problem it has. In fact, the Web page for Windows Me is little more than a Web ad for XP, with topics on the home page such as:

• It’s here! Get Windows XP now
• Want to go fast? Windows XP will set you free
• See what the reviewers say about Windows XP
• Top 10 reasons to move to Windows XP
• Upgrade information for Windows XP

I guess that some of those 500-hours of learning everything about PCs is supposed to be devoted to studying as much as you can about an OS that the vendor doesn’t even want you to use.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, though, given the scope of the A+ OS exam. Even though it routinely gets “updated” with the addition of new material, very little gets removed. Although the objectives no longer come right out and say “DOS," some of the questions are holdovers to the days when it was king.

If you’re going to call the exams “updated," shouldn’t they reflect what is supposed to be supported in the field today?

What Kind of Bell Curve Are We Talking About?
I was always of the belief that the purpose of a passing score is to weed out those who don’t know their content from those who do. CompTIA uses a grading scale that ranges from 100 to 900. In other words, if you don’t know diddly, you should still be able to show your employer that you got a score of 100 and not feel like a complete moron. Starting at something other than zero is not an uncommon concept and occurs in many tests - 120 is the lowest you can score on the LSAT.

Theoretically then, if you only know half of what you should know, you’ll get a score of 500. If you know three-quarters, you’ll get a score of 700, and so on. So how much do you need to know to become A+ certified? To quote from the Web site: “The minimum passing score for the A+ Core Hardware exam is 467 and the minimum passing score for the A+ OS Technologies exam is 469. Ninety minutes are allowed to complete each exam.”

If my public-school elementary math skills are allowing me to interpret this correctly, the passing score for each exam is approximately 46 percent. That seems to mean that you can miss 54 percent of the questions and still pass! If so, then you you really don’t need to spend too much of those 500-hours studying SCSI and networking after all.

Why Does “Vendor Neutral” Have To Mean “Microsoft”?
I’ve talked about this one before, so I won’t spend a great deal of time on it here. It irks me to no end that A+ is supposed to be a vendor-neutral certification, yet in addition to the hardware exam you are required to take an exam that focuses on Microsoft operating systems. Why not allow a person to choose the Microsoft OS exam, or choose the Linux+ exam in its place?

For that matter, why test on the operating systems at all – the vendors already do this. If A+ is a hardware certification, then it should test on hardware alone.

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