Thoughts on Acquia Certification

Yesterday I've got Acquia Backend Specialst Drupal 8 cerificate.

For those few who are interested in how good I was, I'm showing a full report:

Overall Score: 80.00%

Result: PASS

Topic Level Scoring:

Section 1 : Fundamental Web Concepts: 100.00%

Section 2 : Drupal core API : 70.00%

Section 3 : Debug code and troubleshooting: 75.00%

Section 4 : Theme Integration: 83.33%

Section 5 : Performance: 75.00%

Section 6 : Security: 87.50%

Section 7 : Leveraging Community: 75.00%

For those even less who want to know my thoughts, i'll try to lay them out below.

First, a brief introduction to what Acquia Certification is. It is intended for Drupal professionals, and has 3 levels: Site Builder, Developer, and Specialist (Back End or Front End). So 4 tests in 2 variants - for Drupal 7 or 8, which totals to 8 different tests and corresponding certificates one may have. Site Builder does not touch code development; Developer is a mix of module usage and basic coding; Specialist is entirely about writing code for Drupal and concepts behind it. All tests consist of multiple-choice questions (no code that you have to write, no freeform answers), and there is a total time limit for the entire test. You can go back and review any question. For my test (D8 Backend Specialist) it was 60 questions and 90 minutes. I think it’s the same for the rest. There is a pass rate - if you answer over certain percentage of questions, you passed. For specialists it is 70%, for the rest (I think) - 60%. Test is paid, Specialist one costs $350, others $250. If you fail or just miss the schedule, it’s non-refundable. And it’s individual - either you set up your computer or go to some authorized facility which provides you with an empty room, a PC set up for the test and pulls everything out of your pockets. You can schedule the test for any time.

And now the thoughts.

Thought #1, immediately after leaving the premises: the correlation between being able to develop and the score in this test may just randomly deviate from zero. This certification is more about being able to talk about Drupal. Many situations are quite artificial and contain more than a half of the answer. In other cases, choices are rather obvious - sometimes the correct answer is the only one containing some meaningful Drupal-related terminology. And, say, when you give an answer “I would create a service with a certain tag” or “I would use this class as a base class for writing my test” doesn’t actually mean that you are able to write this service or a test.

Thought #2: it’s a great deal of psychological load, when you have to go through a big number of questions without having any feedback. I noticed that I started rather fast - going through first 20 questions in under 20 minutes, but since I ran into a question or two where I definitely didn’t know the answer, I lost my confidence, slowed down and started to hesitate even with the simplest ones.

Though #3: every paid certification is not trustful. A few days before going to this one, I took a Drupal test at Upwork. And I failed (being out of top 30% on Upwork is a failure, and my result was just “above average”). Ok, I made some blunders having been tricked by typos in questions (Acquia questions have typos as well), will retake this test at the soonest allowed date and I’m almost sure I will do better, but anyway - the Upwork test is more requiring (update - I've retaken the test and got into top 10% or even 5% easily). And there’s at least thousand developers on Upwork who have passed this test with good scores (3000+ passed in total). While there’s only ~200 Acquia certified D8 Back End specialists. And the reason, to me, is obvious: you have to pay $350 just for one certificate. If you want to get Grand Master degree, that would cost ~$1000 for one version of Drupal (one Developer and 2 Specialist qualifications). No one is eager to pay it out of own pocket. Many businesses have money and are under magical charm of shiny sealed papers to send their employees to certification. On the other hand, who pays the piper, calls the tune. No one would pay for the test where he is likely to fail. That drives me to the conclusion that certificate is kind of bottom line, but you may find a developer without any certificate who would be awesome. And you shouldn’t expect brilliancy of a certified one. For a business unrelated to Drupal wanting to hire a Drupal developer such a certificate could be an asset, since they have no knowledge how to understand the skills of a person themselves. But for development shops - no.

Thought #4: still, this is the most that can be done in 1.5 hours. It’s quite comprehensive and covers a wide range of topics. It requires more of understanding than of mechanical ability to reproduce. As with any test, the most useful part is preparation, I refreshed something, got deeper and systematic understanding of Drupal, even got eager to start writing tests. And the test itself highlighted some things which I’m ashamed of not (knowing) being sure of.