Few days back I got an opportunity to review the certification prep kit for Exam 70-515 (C#) from UCertify. The prep kit software neatly downloads and installs on your machine (tested with Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise) without any malware. Once the prep kit is installed you can download and any exam you want.
So first things first. If you are looking for some short cut to pass your examination, then this is not it. This a preparation toolkit which will help you prepare for your exams considering that you have a good amount of knowledge in the technology. This is not some cheap software which has stolen question bank through which you can cheat the exam and your career.
As every prep kit, this software has set of question banks where you can prepare the examinations. There are good set of questions in their bank which allows you to take a real time like exam as any other software. But, that’s not the coolest part of the software. It has a social bar at the bottom which allows you to tag, add notes and even put feedbacks which can be seen by other users. You can also bookmark questions for later use. Once you are done with the exam, the test results are shown and your result will be stored and tracked. The question quality and the application flow was clean and good. But that wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to check the quality of the materials it offers. I must say that it didn’t disappoint me. It had good number of topics covered with facts, articles and tutorial videos. The videos were hosted in Youtube and for some reason it wasn’t playing inside the software but was displayed as an Url. What impressed me is the “How to” part which was written excellent. To my opinion it had everything you would require to prepare your examination.
Looking at the downside there were definitely few things which made me feel that it could have been better. Though there was excellent amount of study materials, it appeared as if it is more exam oriented than knowledge oriented. May be the upcoming updates should concentrate to present it in the way it will help people learn technology better rather helping them in scoring the examination though a prep kit is meant for scoring. Though it had an option of taking exams custom based, I would have loved if had an option giving exams chapter by chapter, where I can concentrate on one chapter at a time and then move to the next. The one which disappointed me the most is the “Study Helper” which I personally felt like one liners which adds nothing but answers thing on a one liner more like a fill in the blanks.
The best feature of this software, is that it monitors your progress and shows in a very neat timeline graph and also tells you once you are ready for the exams. And the other best feature is that you can retake exams with the questions which you failed.
As a final word, though there were few pitfalls, this prep kit is definitely one of the best you could get in the market. It has a great material where there is still a little room for progress but it does everything it promises i.e., preparing you for the exam and also letting you know when you are ready. If I had to rate on a scale over 0 to 5, this prep kit scores a awesome 3.75
Overall I felt that “If confidence is what wins you the race, then you will earn that with this preparation kit.” Personally I would recommend this to any programmer who is looking for a Prepkit.