An Irish person takes an Acquia Certified Drupal Exam; the results will astound you

So there I was, sitting in my batcave, minding my own business, wondering what to do with an afternoon. In truth I had plenty of work to do, but since I got paid yesterday, I felt as rich as Bruce Wayne himself and decided to take an afternoon off and splash out on an Acquia Certified Drupal Examination. Which one? Well, to start off, the site builder one. Did I pass? Read on, my friends.

What I expected

I wasn't expecting the exam to be too difficult. You need to get over 68% to pass the exam, but I've been building sites with Drupal since Drupal 6.3. It can't be that hard, can it? My presumption was that the questions might be a little tricky in parts, very easy in other areas, but nothing that I wouldn't be able for. I was aiming for in excess of 90%.

The exam I took was the online one where you register in advance and set up Sentinel on your computer. That was quite unnerving and invasive I thought. I signed up, created my Sentinel account, installed the software, then had to go through two recognition items. The first was to type my name 10 times to get a record of my typing style. The second was to take shots of my face to get a record of that. In seriousness, I wasn't happy about this and certainly worry about the NSA and other bodies (inadvertently) having access to my personal data (as well as credit card details etc).

Timewise, I didn't see a problem. I had an hour and a half to get two thirds of 50 site building questions correct.

How it played out

In reverse order - you don't have an hour and a half, you have an hour and a quarter (though I only realised that after the exam - during it, I just thought the first 15 minutes went very quick).

Doing an exam online with Sentinel is very unnerving. You are told it is a proctored exam and I never knew if I was being watched or not, or if all the facial recognition stuff was doing the watching of me. Then if I tried to scratch my back would a bot think I was trying to cheat. If I looked at the corner of my screen to see the time (Sentinel takes over your whole screen so you can't), would it be construed that I was trying to look at a second monitor. All-in-all, not a pleasant experience.

The exam is not "difficult" in the traditional sense, but it is very tricky. At times I thought the questions were not very clear and on a number of occasions more than one response could have been correct.

What do you need to know? You need to know the admin pages of a Drupal website very well. Most importantly, you need to know the exact phrases that are used on admin pages and on what exact page they are on. You will not have the option to check.

You should also have a good understanding of the views module - how it works, what it does, when you might use it - especially in relation to contextual filters and relationships.

One question about stopping spam accounts had 4 options, two of which were: remove "create new account" permission from anonymous role; and, on account settings page set who can create accounts to administrator only. Both of these looked like likely answers to me (until I remembered there is no "create new account" permission). There were a lot of questions like that - be careful, read the question and the answers very closely. (Once or twice I tried to read out loud, but then got worried that the damn Sentinel would construe this as trying to communicate with someone.)

As mentioned above, there were a number of questions which I thought more than one answer could have been correct. For example, how would you install a new theme. Options included: 1) Go to the "Appearance" page, select "install a new theme" and follow the instructions; 2) Download the theme, place it in sites/default/themes and clear the cache. I went with the second option. I don't know if I was right, but either of those methods seems workable to me. Given my low score in that area, I've a feeling I was wrong. (Pity there wasn't a drush dl <project-name> option for that question!)

The result

I scored a decent 88% (which means I got 44 out of 50 questions correct). I'm happy(ish) with that and it's certainly spurred me on to do the rest of the exams. I'll take the front-end exam next, and then the backend one. I wouldn't be happy to use Sentinel again, so I think I'll sign up for the front-end exam at DrupalCon Barcelona.

Here are my exact results:

• Overall Score: 88.00%
• Result: Pass
• Topic Level Scoring:
  • Section 1 - Drupal Features: 100.00%
  • Section 2 - Content and User Management: 100.00%
  • Section 3 - Content Modeling: 91.66%
  • Section 4 - Site Display: 70.00%
  • Section 5- Community and Contributed Projects: 80.00%
  • Section 6 - Module and Theme Management: 75.00%
  • Section 7 - Security and Performance: 100.00%

If you think your project would benefit from the involvement of Mark or any of our highly talented team, feel free to contact us by phone on 01 524 0312, by email at hello@annertech.com, or using our contact form.