How to Become an InDesign ACE
In their list of New Year’s resolutions for 2007, I know a lot of InDesign users include “Get certified in Adobe InDesign,” because I’ve received a rash of e-mails from them in the past couple weeks … “How do I do it?”
It’s actually pretty easy to become an InDesign ACE (Adobe Certified Expert). You just take the official InDesign CS2 Exam — a closed-book, multiple-choice test with about 70 or 80 questions — at any nearby independent testing center that offers it (more on how to find these centers and register for the test appears below). The test costs $150 USD. Many employers will reimburse you for this, or if you’re a freelancer, it’s probably tax-deductible.
If you getting a passing score or better (usually around 70% correct is passing), you’re an ACE. The testing center tells you the minimum passing score and your score immediately after taking the test. You’ll be mailed a Welcome Kit from Adobe in a few weeks with a purty certificate and instructions on how to download the ACE logos for use in your web site, resume, or business cards.
If you didn’t pass, no biggie. You can take the test again after three months and the fee will be less (50% less, I think). Since each exam pulls its set of 80 questions or so from a bank of a few hundred questions it won’t be the exact same test, but at least you’ll have an idea of the scope and depth of the questions.
How Hard is the Test?
I’ve taken a lot of ACE tests over the years, including ones for Acrobat, GoLive, and Photoshop. (You have to take a test with each new version of each product … for CS2 I’ve just taken the ones for InDesign and InCopy.) Somehow I’ve managed to pass all of these on my first try, but for a couple that shall remain nameless I’ve staggered out of the testing center clutching my barely-passing score in my hands and had a stiff drink.
The InDesign CS2 test is not one of the nameless ones — it’s easier than some others, in my opinion. They give you at least 90 minutes but you’ll probably be done in half that time. If you’re an experienced InDesign user who works with a variety of project types (long and short docs, image-heavy and text-heavy) every day, and a good chunk of the program is quite familiar to you, you’ll probably be able to get a passing score right off the bat. There is no better preparation than actually using the program for real world jobs … and paying attention to the menu commands while you’re doing so.
To bolster your confidence, you may want to bone up on at least a couple areas of the product that a lot of people seldom use, such as the Book palette, interactive PDFs, using Bridge with InDesign, XML tags and the like. InDesign’s own online help (Help > InDesign Help) is ideal for this, as is the Adobe InDesign CS2 Classroom in a Book, especially because I think — but don’t quote me here — that all the correct answers from the actual exam are lifted right out of one or both of these resources.
Get the Exam Prep Guide
You can get an idea of what the test covers, and sample test questions and answers, by downloading the ACE Exam Guide for InDesign CS2 (PDF, 200K) from the Exam Prep Resources page on the Adobe site.
A brief review of the “Exam Topic Areas and Objectives” section shows that the test covers a fairly wide scope. Don’t let that discourage you, though. Since there’s a finite number of exam questions pulled from a larger pool, you might encounter only two or three from any one particular area. Person A taking the test might have to deal with only two XML questions, Person B might have nine (oh, lucky you). But you could conceivably fail all the XML questions and still pass, if you did well enough in the other areas.
Here’s a sample question from the practice exam:
You are editing a story in the Story Editor. A red vertical bar is displayed to the left of some of the text in the story. What does this indicate?
A. The text is overset.
B. You have edited the text.
C. Manual formatting is applied.
D. A red swatch is applied to the text.
(I’ll let someone post the correct answer as a comment.)
Register for the test
You can register for the InDesign CS2 ACE exam online, by phone, or in person at the testing center. When you register you can choose a location near you (there are over a thousand worldwide) and choose a time and date weeks in advance if you like.
The two companies that run the tests for Adobe are Pearson Vue and Thomson Prometric. Use the links to these companies from the Step 2 page of Adobe.com’s “Get Certified Today” section and you’ll be brought to the Adobe exam registration page for either one.
Good luck, and have fun!
The answer to that one is “A”. I’ve been interested in doing that recently, but since my new job has less cutting edge InDesign work, my company won’t pick up the tab.
I have to add something: The InDesign ACE test is really annoying because many of the questions focus on extremely obscure aspects of features or completely irrelevant aspects of InDesign.
For example, I remember getting frustrated at one point because the answer to a question hinged entirely on the actual wording in a dialog box. Y’know, nobody needs to know that it’s “Baseline Options” instead of “Baseline Preferences” (I just made that example up, but it’s similar to the kinds of questions that made me kick the chair.)
Another great frustration was that a surprising number of questions had ambiguous answers or even more than one answer.
Don’t get me wrong: I passed with a 90%+ score. But don’t be surprised if you find yourself angry with whomever wrote the test as you walk out the door.
The text is overset.
You have to be kidding. How can anybody say this test is easy??? It’s much closer to what David Blatner said, but then again…dude…didn’t you write a book on it? You *should* have scored that well. For me, though…it was a rotten experience. I’m working on the Acrobat test now, which is maybe WORSE.
Brian, it all depends on what you mean by easy. The questions are not complex or complicated — that is, in my experience, they don’t make you really think through a problem. It’s more like you either know the answer or not. The hard thinking I had to do was more like, “What on earth was the person thinking when they wrote this? What could they possibly mean by this question that has more than one good answer?”
I just read a link about another kind of InDesign testing which was kind of interesting.
I am looking at doing the InDesign ACE course and wondered if you could recommend any reading material (other than the ones you have mentioned above..) to aid with the study or have any tips for studying up..?
I took the ACE for IDCS3 two days ago — and flunked! I got 56% of a needed 66%. But what’s 100% is my agreement with David here: many parts of this exam “focus on extremely obscure aspects of features or completely irrelevant aspects of InDesign.”
Very many of the questions could be answered by a “Rainman” type of savant-person — one who had a great memory of every little exact detail in the manual and the menus, but no conceptual, abstract *grasp* of the what actual, real-world InDesign work consists of. I’ve used ID intensively for every version since 1.5, so that’s more than seven years, and like to think I can handle the program pretty well (and related issues, like pre-press) in most respects — and yet I flunked. It will be somewhat of a chore to take it again, now that I know how annoying many of the questions can be. I will re-take it, after more studies in my weak areas — but I have a much lower opinion now of what kind of real-world competence the ACE actually *proves* anyone to possess.
Klaus, argh! My sympathies … how aggravating!
Didn’t they just recently release the CS3 ACE tests? Maybe they’ve rewritten them to make them even *more* difficult. Yikes!
In my post, when I said it was “relatively easy,” I was comparing it to the other ACE tests for other programs I’ve taken. I could just imagine the horrific nature of the Photoshop test about now …
Thanks for your sympathies, Anne-Marie! Yes, AFAIK it’s only the ID CS3 which is just out (adobe.com is still hiding the ID CS3 Exam Guide, I had to email Tim Cole to get hold of a copy!), not yet PS CS3. I’m planning on taking the PS one also this winter/spring — heavy sigh! I’m now waiting for David’s ID CS Beyond The Basics course at lynda.com, and hope that will fill in some of my blanks. But I must clearly study the manual more — and actually use features like XML (grrr!) and Book (acceptable).
In all How many employers actually look for this? anyone know. Or are you taking it for the sake of takign it?
i just passed the InDesign CS3 recertification exam. It was much more difficult than CS2 as many of the questions dealt with the lesser-used features (interactive buttons?). Although I passed, my score was almost 20 points lower than when I took the CS2 exam. Note: i’ve been an ID user since 2002 and i’m always amazed by how much the product evolves at each new version.
Klaus is quite right - the CS3 InDesign test is skewed toward the interactivity of the application, and I got the exact same score he did - a 56%. I realized halfway through that I wouldn’t pass. And like him, I’ve been a heavy user of InDesign since version 2.0 - six YEARS! And I didn’t pass. Argh! The Photoshop ACE test was much easier, though.
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