In late November, Adobe announced on their Facebook Page and in e-mails to some partners that they were discontinuing all the ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) Recertification exams for their applications as of January 1, 2015. If you want to take the InDesign CC (or any other Adobe program) Recert exam, you have about 48 hours to do so. Read on!
In case you’re wondering: When you’re ACE-certified, you have bragging rights ;-D and can put the ACE logo on your site and business card. It may help you get hired or promoted. You can even search for people holding an ACE certificate on the Adobe web site. Once you’ve passed at least one ACE exam, you can go a step further and become an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) for that program, conducting classes independently for clients with Adobe’s blessing (and a linked listing on their Training Partner web page). ACIs can also teach in an authorized Adobe training center. It all begins with the ACE, though.
ACE Certification vs. Recertification
The “Recert” exams have been part of the Adobe ACE certification system for the past few years. They’re only available to anyone who holds an ACE for the previous version of the Adobe program in question and were only available for a limited time. If you qualified to take a Recert, you could register for it, pay the discounted fee, and take the multiple-choice web-based exam all on-line, as long as you completed the test within two hours or so from when you began. You could register and take the test whenever it was convenient to you, from your own home or office, in an essentially open-book situation. You got your exam results immediately and your new ACE certification “diploma” arrived by PDF shortly thereafter, assuming you passed.
Now that they’re discontinuing the Recert exams, anyone who wants to become ACE-certified will need to trek to a off-site Pearson testing location that’s proctored (not open book) and take the full exam at a higher fee, even if you’ve been an ACE in that program for years. In recompense for the inconvenience, Adobe is extending the life of an ACE certification to two full years.
The InDesign CC recertification exam has been out since early summer of 2014, and the new full certification exam was just made available in December. That means if you’re certified in CS6, you have until Wednesday, Dec. 31st (two days from now), to take the more convenient InDesign CC Recertification test, and then not have to worry about taking it again for another two years.
Click this text link to register for the InDesign CC Recertification exam. (Only available to those who are InDesign ACEs for CS6, and remember, the test is only available until December 31, 2014.)
I just took it, and it’s not an easy test, even though, um, it’s kind of my living. Gah! There are only 50 questions so I’m assuming they wanted to test for 200 things packed into those 50 questions. The good news is, though, that you just need to get 37 of those 50 questions correct, as 65% is a passing score. (For the record, I got 88%, and was happy to have done it.)
This article was last modified on July 25, 2019
This article was first published on December 29, 2014
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