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Article by Alwyn.
Published: November 4, 2009 at 16:23
Category: Flash
Adobe certified expert
< back to overviewSo yesterday I finally took the time to do my recertification for Flash CS4 (93%) and I must say I finished with mixed feelings. Sure I was happy that I now can finally put that certified expert/instructor logo on my site but the exam experience itself was a little bit dissapointing.
First of all, a lot of concerns have been raised in the community on the actual value of this certified status. And I couldn’t agree more; the questions were a mixture of things and not at all qualified to measure your knowledge of the flash IDE. The only difficulty lies most of the time in the fact that some questions are sooo dubious (is that a word?) that even an experienced flasher frowns his eyebrows. I take the example of 4 strings of code and you have to find the one where the comma is set on the correct spot. I mean that’s not a question, that’s just a test to see if you are still awake 
.
In my case I had 2 of those questions and also 2 where the question was either asked in a wrong way or had more than 1 valid answer (e.g: symbols, bitmaps and shapes can all be ‘transformed’ by the free transform tool mr. Questionnaire, if you would’ve asked ‘distort’ this question would actually make sense…).
So in that light I also wonder what the true value is of this ‘certified expert’ status, except being listed on the adobe site an be able to go for instructor, but do you know for sure a person knows his stuff when he is certified? Because it felt more like I could learn everything out of the head to pass than actually have experience with the software.
On another note, wouldn’t it be great to have seperate certifications (and I’m not talking about the formfactor of the tests) for animators/designers and developers? I mean, as a developer I shouldn’t have to care about the location or of the inkbottle tool or how to use shape hints and nor should an animator know which class he should use to load xml files in the player.
Some of the tools you just (know how to) use and some things you just take for granted (e.g. the developer will find a way to get this data to update from an external source ) Since flash is ever expanding with new features, I think it’s normal that people focus more on specific parts than others. As a result we will see a lot of different profiles in the future for essentially the same piece of software. Just take a look at the 3D industry.
IMHO though a Flash pro expert should be kind of a jack-of-all-trades
Me personally, I still like to start from an empty .fla file. The Flash IDE keeps me in this playfull world where there is something more touchable than just code. It’s so easy to quickly make a mockup or create a small graphic and attach some code to it. But I guess that is because I kind of rolled into the whole scripting thing, before I was just making small animations in flash.
On the coding side however I use Flash Develop because it’s just awesome and free . Go get it!.
Now on what kind of exams we can use for the future (multiple choice, practical test, jury of community members, …) I’m not going to talk about that, just read some of the following links below. There are some great ideas out there! Well actually I have to look up some of those links, I only found 1 for now . I’ll keep you posted!
http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2009/06/13/community-certification/
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