After taking the trifecta of Acquia Developer Certification ( General , Back-end , Front-end ) exams and earned a new black 'Grand Master' sticker, I decided to complete the gauntlet and take the Acquia Certified Drupal Site Builder Exam at DrupalCon LA.
Taking the test in Acquia's testing center was a welcome reprieve from taking the exams online. There's much less of a 'big brother' feel when you don't have a 'sentinel' application running on your computer and a camera focusing on your face the entire time. Also, the exam room is nice and quiet, and has a good 'library' vibe to it.
Exam Content
The site builder exam is, in many ways, the most straightforward of the Drupal certification exams. Most of the scenarios are very cut-and-dry, and there are only 50 questions on the test (as opposed to 60 for the other exams).
There are a few questions that made me think a bit. Most are presented as general scenarios, just like the other exams, with a list of solutions from which you pick the best, and many are things that I've encountered or been asked about on a project in the past (e.g. "User johndoe tried doing X , but got an error... how do I give johndoe the ability to do X "). There were also a decent number of questions asking about how to set up a view and/or block correctly to display relevant information for a given scenario.
One oddity was the number of aggregator-related questions on the exam. I can count on one finger the number of times I've used aggregator.module, and I've built hundreds of Drupal sites. I think I had three or four aggregator-related questions, and it felt a little strange (though those questions were straightforward enough I could answer them without much familiarity with aggregator).
I think the exam could use a tiny bit more expansion into contrib-powered site building. Maybe a question or two on panels-based layout, flag, organic groups, or some of the other more popular contrib modules that a seasoned Drupal site builder would need to use on a larger project.
Results
On this exam, I scored a 92%, and (as with the other exams) a nice breakdown of all the component scores was provided in case I want to brush up on a certain area:
- Drupal Features: 80.00%
- Content and User Management: 100.00%
- Content Modeling: 91.66%
- Site Display: 90.00%
- Community and Contributed Projects: 100.00%
- Module and Theme Management: 75.00%
- Security and Performance: 100.00%
Again, I like how the exam gives a breakdown of each area of strength/weakness. It helps me to validate areas where I could improve my skills through workshops, books, research, etc.
Summary
On the whole, the exam hits on most of the right bits of Drupal core + Views, and gives a good set of questions to evaluate how good you may be at site building in general. It's a simpler, less 'development'-focused exam in comparison to the other exams, and would be great for those wishing to validate their general site building skills.