I am a big sports fan—sort of. I like to watch the last quarter of the football game, the final inning of the baseball game, the last day of the golf tournament. You get the idea.

So you would think that the fact that we are less than two months away from our certification exam would thrill me. And it does—for many reasons. But I also approach this exam with much trembling and trepidation. I fear that we haven’t studied enough, that we study too infrequently. The latter is more concerning. When we have our weekly study sessions, I often forget what we looked at the previous week, let alone three months ago. Too much other stuff—life—gets in the way.

But, at any rate, we press on. We’ve covered nearly all of the topics in the Certification Guide, so now we are in review mode. Since we’ve taken most of the quizzes in the book already, we are now going through and taking the quizzes at the end of each self-paced e-learning module of the Programming I and Programming II courses. These quizzes are great, because they show us which questions we’ve missed and then we know we need to go back and review those topics again. And very soon we plan on taking the practice exam.

If you’ve taken the certification exam (pass or fail) after taking the practice exam, I’d like to know how similar the practice exam was to the actual exam. Has anyone taken the practice exam, failed miserably, then aced the certification exam? Or vice versa? We are considering taking the exam as a group, so as to maximize our study group’s brain power. I wish we could do the same for the real exam, but obviously that can’t happen.

But this weekend, with baseball coming down the home stretch, college football starting again, and preseason professional football galore, I won’t be doing much studying, except during those boring early innings and quarters.