Funny you say that. In some other programming community, when one of the consultancy shops was questioning the community what they think of certifications, they were surprised to read that I was one of a few who said certifications are useless and especially so in programming. What it also reminds me of is one job interview where instead of the scheduled pair programming session I had to program my 3rd (IIRC) working program for them to show again that I can code something from scratch. In that case I didn't recall all the pieces of the framework/api from memory, and having to consult a reference book made me fail the test. If a certificate of Foo API Expert would have saved me that failure, then maybe it's worth something, but other than that a certificate says nothing about a developer.

Did you ever take the test?

There wasn't all that much about 'remembering useless details from a manual' in it. I've taken the cert twice (5.x and 5.3 IIRC) and in neither case was there much in the way of 'manual trivia'. Far more were scanning a piece of code and being able to determine what the outcome was (error? if so, which one? if not, what's the output?) than haystack/needle issues.

grumble grumble standardized tests

You can say that. But, then I was introduced to real programming. :)