Thanks for sharing these greats tips,@Mark2010 I am especially interested since I am coaching a few colleagues to pass the exams. It would be worth mentioning also that some Test exams are now available free of charge, which is incredibly useful !
My only quibble about the exams - I know this is highly debatable - is their only availability in English or Japanese : not every SAS practitioner is a native English speaker - I learned it at School for example, being French. SAS puts a lots of efforts translating the software UI, messages, etc. which is great but for the time being, this stops short of Certification Exams content, unfortunately.
In this regards, perhaps less debatable in my opinion is the fact that some questions are made unnecessarily difficult to understand at first read, involving double negations, modal verbs counterintuitive usage (may/might) or adverbial constructions familiar only to the most proficient English speakers. This might - in my opinion - actually decrease the exams ability to differentiate between the candidates knowledge of SAS only and also refrain some very talented SAS users to take them, feeling they don't have the English skills level to pass it.
I hope I didn't express myself too much 'outspokenly', I merely speak out of experience. I should add also that this language 'gap' applies less to Northern Europe and more to France, Italy or Spain and that younger people are becoming more proficient than before, closing the 'gap' somehow.
Thanks you for the feedback. While we can't do a full translation on our exams to many languages, we do need to do a good job ensuring that the language is clear to English as a second language candidates. While I'm confident that we avoid double negatives, the other areas that you mention are things we need to do a better job taking into account. Often, we have non-native English speakers in our development workshops, but we can do better at getting a more diverse review of the items. Thanks for pointing this out.
