Sharepoints: ACTC Exam: A Certifiably Better Exam
22 January 2003
The Apple Certified Technical Coordinator exam is certainly the best-written Apple exam that I have ever taken. The previous ACTC exams for Mac OS X 10.1 left me with the feeling that they had been translated from English into a foreign language and then back again using Sherlock, so I wasn’t expecting too much.
The exam is longer than the previous ones were, with 115 questions. There is only one to take instead of the two for 10.1. The questions did a rather good job of plumbing the depths of your Mac OS X knowledge without getting too bogged down in asking you to spit out passages from the product data sheets. It was also refreshing to see an emphasis on actually being asked to use your knowledge to troubleshoot and solve problems.
So: a couple of tips on how to get the 72% you need to pass.
- Read the Admin Guide. This is simple, but necessary to state. There is no study guide, at least that I am aware of, for the test. However all of the questions are pretty much out of the Admin Guide. More specifically they are out of the materials you get if you take Apple’s Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server Essentials class. Granted, 600-odd pages of software manual is not exactly light reading. However, the pearls of wisdom that you can glean from that document are great. The guide comes as a PDF that can be freely downloaded from Apple’s web site. Do it.
- Read the Read Me file for the Mac OS X and the Mac OS X Server installers. You will need to know supported machines and basic requirements. In fact you should read this if you plan on taking the test or not.
- Use Mac OS X Server. Just having read the manuals won’t be enough. The questions that you will be asked will cover practical use of the features in real-world scenarios. Manage someone’s permissions, even if you have no reason to. Use NetBoot at least once. Many of the new features of Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 10.2 are so cool that you should run through them all once or twice if you have the time. Too many people aren’t even aware of all that Mac OS X can do. You’ll certainly be a better administrator for having done this.
- Use the utilities that come with Mac OS X. A good understanding of what tools are at your disposal will help you out significantly. What can you use to solve networking or drive problems? What common sense steps can you take when things aren’t working out the way that they should be? The exam only covers Apple software, so don’t worry about having to know anything about third party applications.
- Read up on NetInfo. I know this is a bit of a black art, or at least it can certainly seem that way. However, NetInfo is incredibly important for so many of the advanced Mac OS X configurations that you need to know it. Again, go back to the Admin Guide for this. Also check out Apple’s PDF on understanding NetInfo. You won’t have to know the advanced stuff like replication and such, but you will need to know the basics about how it works.
- Find a good book on networking and read it. Most likely this book will be rather thick, perhaps even more so than the Admin Guide. Take it slow, especially if you haven’t been exposed to this before. Any basic networking book will do as the questions on the test are not hard but they do involve knowing a little bit about a lot of networking concepts and terminology. Basic understanding of DNS, DHCP, discovery services and directory services will be important. Again, much of this you’ll get from the Admin Guide, but a good overall view of networking will bring it all home for you.
- Relax. You can miss over a fourth of the questions and still pass. You won’t get a gold star for getting them all correct. Your certificate will be the same as everyone else that passed, so don’t sweat it. Bail on the questions that you can’t answer the first time around and come back to them. You have over two hours to complete the test, so you should not be pressed for time.
Funny how preparing yourself for the exam seems an awful lot like how to become a better administrator. That is certainly the sign of a good test.
Oh, in case you were wondering I passed.