I passed my AWS Security Specialty Exam yesterday.
I scored a 863 on the exam, and I’ll be honest, there was a point about 30 minutes in that I wasn’t sure I was going to pass and I would just write this off to testing experience and prep. It seemed that every other question of the first 10 were something that wasn’t covered in my test prep.
Thanks you to Ryan and Faye for this amazing course.
Here is my feedback.
Exam was not super complicated at the same time not extremely simple.
AWS exams are a moving target, they are definitely being updated regularly. There were about 15 questions that dealt with new services and new features in services that look to have been added since August 2019. These were not covered in either of the courses that I took. I relied on my overall knowledge and experience to get me through those and made a best guess after eliminating the answers that could not be correct.
These new services and features were not covered in any courses that I took, but were covered in re:Invent videos, I can’t stress the importance of reviewing those. Just go to re:Invent in YouTube, and you can search for security and network and target relevant videos. Scan through the AWS Security blogs for new features as well.
So all in all, it was a tiring exam. I completed it with 45 mins to spare. I went back and reviewed my flagged questions.
My study material : Linux Academy and ACloudGuru. Prep time ~ 30 days
Cheers,
Robert
1 Answers
Congrats on passing! Thanks a lot for the feedback, yes the exams are definitely a moving target and it’s worth noting that they do include a few questions that you are not actually scored on, I think they do it to test questions out and see how they are received. I think this is sometimes the case when they throw in a curveball type question about something really new that seems out of whack with everything else….but that is just my theory!
I spotted this on the new Certification blog:
To keep our exams current, we continue the process of writing and reviewing items. To evaluate these newly created items, we place them on the live exam but don’t use them to judge candidate competency. If they statistically perform well, they may be used in the future to replace items in the same content area. On the AWS Certified Database – Specialty exam, for example, a subset of the 65 items on the exam are being tested and don’t count in the candidate’s score. However, the candidates are not told which items are unscored.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/training-and-certification/the-experts-behind-aws-certification-exams/