I've been studying for about 3 months to take the Zend Certified Engineer PHP exam and believe I am ready to take the exam soon.  My study has just involved reading several books and taking practice exams.  I had an idea to take the Brainbench PHP5 Certification test as a practice exam and since my work pays for all of my certification training and exams it was free for me (the normal price is $49). 

The test limits you to 3 minutes per question and judges several areas of your PHP  knowledge.  The problem is some of the code examples could not possibly run (and they ask you for the results), several questions are on specialized APIs and a few of the questions were not even related to PHP. 

The question that sticks out in my mind is a SQL question (I had two).  Although I can't remember the exact question it was something like this:


 

What should go in place of the ?????  

The two questions were not that simplistic (although they were fairly simple) but you get the idea that this question doesn't directly relate to PHP.  Because of these two SQL questions Brainbench stated that databases are one of my strengths.

Aside from these few errors the overall test wasn't bad.  Anyone taking the test can easily cheat by loading another tab or browser and heading to the PHP manual.  Because of this I believe the certifications are useless to actual employers (but it can't hurt).  After passing the test I received a "masters" stamp (I'm not sure how high you need to score to get that) and a free certificate (it is on its way in the mail).