Five year old passes Microsoft Certified Professional exam

He’s not due to take his GCSEs for another decade, but five-year-old Ayan Qureshi from Coventry has become the youngest person to pass the Microsoft Certified Professional exam.

While Qurershi’s contemporaries are busy looking through the windows of their wendy houses, Ayan has been busy building his own Windows network with his IT consultant father.

Asim Qurershi says he first introduced his son to PC hardware at the age of three. “I found whatever I was telling him, the next day he’d remember everything I said, so I started to feed him more information,” he told the BBC. “Too much computing at this age can cause a negative effect, but in Ayan’s case he has cached this opportunity.”

Ayan’s mastery of the motherboards convinced his father to enter him for the Microsoft Certified Professional exam. The exam, which takes around two to three hours to complete, includes up to 90 multiple choice questions.

Sample questions on the Microsoft website include:

You have a computer that runs Windows 7. You start the computer and receive the following error message:

BOOTMGR is missing

Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

You then start the computer from the Windows 7 installation media. You need to ensure that the computer successfully starts Windows 7. What are two possible ways to achieve this goal?

A. Run Startup Repair

B. Run System Restore

C. Run Bootrec/RebuildBcd

D. Run Bcdedit/createstore

Asim says the toughest challenge wasn’t teaching his son the solutions, but how to understand the questions in the first place. “There were multiple choice questions, drag and drop questions, hotspot questions and scenario-based questions,” he told the BBC. “The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five year old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory.”

Ayan reportedly spends two hours a day learning about operating systems and installing programmes. We’ll make him a PC Pro columnist as soon as he’s old enough not to break child labour laws.