I took my first exam this week, and my takeaway is that these exams assess your ability to... take these exams. I have used ArcGIS intensively for the past two years - hours each day - including the applications ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Experience Builder, Dashboards, Business Analyst, and Pro. I have more knowledge in the software than the teams of engineers that I work with. Yet this exam is purely verbal (you can't look at the software while taking the exam), and includes questions about Business Analyst or in what tab in ArcMap you would find a certain function - when we all know that Esri changes its software constantly and maybe you use Online or Pro instead of ArcMap, or maybe you're a heavy Pro user and you don't use Business Analyst.
Anyway - I found in my one experience that this exam doesn't assess practical knowledge, but rather your ability to take the test the way they wrote it. For $250. It would be way more useful to me, for example, for them to simply ask you to build a map with provided layers, and then analyze or visualize the data in a certain way.
