2012: A Year in Numbers from an Exam Perspective

28 Dec 2012 8:09 PM

Comments 4

As many of you know, I love "year in review" retrospectives, so my holiday gift to all of you is my annual summary of what happened in the world of exams from a numbers perspective. Without further ado, here are my top 10 favorite numbers for 2012:

~400 total MCSA, MCSE, TS, and PRO exam publications, including new publications and republications related to updating exam content (although we had a lot of publications related to the updated drivers, user interface, plug-ins, etc. and exam title changes related to the redesigned certification program, they aren't included in this number--if they were, the number would be closer to 600!)
- Of these, ~190 were ENU and ~40publications were in Spanish, Japanese, German, French, Chinese, and Brazilian Portuguese (per language)
~140 MTA publications
- Of these, ~44 were ENU republications of these 12 exams
~150 new exams were published across all languages
- Of these, ~40 were in ENU (this means that we released ~40 new exams in 2012--no wonder I'm tired!!!)
- ~40 were Dynamics exams across all languages with 5 new exams in ENU

Here's where the numbers get interesting...

33 beta exams
~11,000 beta candidates
~10,200 beta comments--every one of these comments read by yours truly
On average, ~310 comments per beta exam and ~3 comments per beta item...seriously, 20 minutes is long enough for you to provide feedback on a beta exam because if there's an issue with an item, someone will tell me about it!
~75 to 685: The range for the number of comments across all beta exams--yes, one exam had 685 beta comments!
~25 exams received new items as part of the ongoing sustainment of those exams
~7000 new items were created including both new development and sustainment activities

As you can see, this really has been a big year for Microsoft's Certification Program (and these numbers don't include the word we did on the Office exams!). I'm constantly amazed how a team of 14 can accomplish so much--and every year it seems like we do even more! Here's hoping we continue to rock in 2013!

Wishing you all the best this holiday season!

Comments

Jeff Wharton (MCT)

3 Jan 2013 3:40 AM

Will Microsoft ever start releasing stats (again) on the number of certified people that exist in each certification stream i.e. MCPD: Web, MCITP: SQL Server, MCSE etc etc? We get asked this from time-to-time on the MSDN Training and Certification forum and it would be great to have somewhere to point people instead of trying to think up reasons as to why this information is no longer available.
wookie_uk

3 Jan 2013 8:08 AM

+1 on Jeff's question, a fairly small minority of MCP's and partners alike liked being able to point out there were only X others with this, or Y others with that, or out of the Z people with this cert we had N of them....
wookie_uk

3 Jan 2013 8:09 AM

Erm, I meant large minority (sorry it's early here...)
Liberty Munson (Microsoft)

3 Jan 2013 4:28 PM

Hi Jeff,

I get asked about this every year. Unfortunately, Microsoft considers this information proprietary so I can't share it. Further, the number of certified folks is easy to misinterpret. To some people whatever number we give you will be 'too many' and for others it will be 'too few.' As a result, providing these numbers may cause more misconceptions than they would solve and would likely be misused. This is the same reason we don't share passing rates.