This question got asked (and answered) in here several weeks back. I've re-posted my response with a few bits of extra info over on our website so it's easier to find. https://southofshasta.com/blog/why-is-there-so-much-oop-on-the-coldfusion-certification-test/

Firstly, I don't disagree with anything in your post, But isn't the complaint that the topics asked in the test don't match (comparatively) the learning material? And it is just, coincidentally, that the OP feels that the topic of OOP was overly represented in the test, with comparison to the amount of OOP in the source material? Eg. The learning material is 10 pages long - one page is OOP Yet the exam has 10 questions and 7 of those were about OOP. And thus the concern is - there was not enough "weight" placed on OOP in the source material - to match the importance given to OOP in the exam.

Great post, @nolanerck.

@gavinbaumanis perhaps I made some (incorrect) assumptions about what the original poster intended. That said, I have taught CFML and OOP classes all over the US. And in my experience, a lot of people that consider themselves "Senior" ColdFusion developers do so because they've been employed somewhere for a long period of time...it has nothing to do with their actual skills, which are usually more on the junior side. And many of those folks (that I come across anyway) are still very bewildered by OOP. @Adam Cameron short answer: it's a little of both CFC specific and general OOP constructs.

employed somewhere for a long period of time

Not 20yrs experience, but 1yr experience 20x over. There's a lot of that around the place.

I'd venture to say that at least 80% of the folks at our local UG are in that boat. But it comes from the approachability of CF. It attracted folks who weren't in CS and the language allowed them to be successful without that background. It didn't require them to learn it either, so they were able to do their thing.

Yeah, I know. I just wish those ppl weren't as... aspirationless (slightly unkind wording, I know)... with their craft as they are. And do we as a community (incl. Adobe here) really have to pitch things like certification tests that low just to accommodate them? We could be going "it's a certification pal... for it to mean something, you might need to actually be passingly adequate at yer job. We're not asking for a CS degree, we're asking if you know how to create an object with CFML". (I do not have a CS degree, btw. I did some business computing stuff at the local polytech)

And I'm not saying that folks need a CS degree, but if they are going more than the "basic 5" tags, you really need to understand even the most basic CS topics. Things like the difference between client-side and server-side rendering, components/classes, functions/methods, access modifiers, variable types, etc. are really things that are /missing/ from a lot of the CF devs that exist out there.