A few thoughts on the exam

Just passing by to share with you a few notes on my experience so far with the CSAP exam.

I took the exam yesterday and failed with 730 points, my report said 750 was the pass mark. Close, but not close enough.

For me, the key area I screwed up was time management, and if this is anything to go by, remember what Scott explains at the start of the course and throughout I am sure he makes a point about how important it is to time manage the exam in order to do well. Guess what, I knew time was short and never before 3hrs simply vanished in what felt was a few mins. In short: I was half way my time with 45 questions unanswered 🙁

The areas in which I failed, unsurprisingly are the areas in which I probably like the least, "Migration Planning" and "Cost Control", not trying to justify anything, and I understand in order to pass (and do well in an AWS project), these topics are important, I just find these things boring and coming from a purely technical and development background, nothing is more wishy-washy than these two topics, but that’s just me, if you have project management background and skills, this is probably way up your alley.

In terms of study materials:

• read most of the whitepapers in the course material

• watched all of the reInvent videos in the course material (and some more – just because there are free and some are extremely useful, some presenters give master classes in those sessions and I’d argue why would anyone not make the most of having these key artifacts freely available to aid your study)

• practice questions: I used the quizzes provided by ACG, alongside the exam simulator, done the other certs I have taken prior to this again just to re-inforce, also used Whizlabs but would not recommend them, they are not up to date for this exam, they are full of mistakes (if you happen to have time to teach whoever was writing the question, by all means, knock yourselves out and raise support tickets), and least important but still important: they are full of spelling mistakes, save your money

• taken the free AWS exam prep training course

• watched a ton of AWS "This is my architecture" videos

• watched all the AWS CQ videos, if you haven’t seen it, I’d recommend it – they break down the questions and explain most questions in detail

• I paid for the practice exam (normally $40, but got it for $20 with a voucher from the associate exam)

• read a ton of blog materials, mainly AWS

• read AWS FAQs

In terms of the shape of questions, they are mostly (as you should expect) scenario-based, some span over one page long where you must scroll down in order to visualize the options you can choose from

There was one question regarding AWS Connect, I do not recall having this service covered in any of the lectures on Scott’s course, nor I remember seeing it on the Associate exam, at least not up to the point I took the course.

My cloud journey so far: I started studying AWS in April, sailed through the first 4 tests quite easily, did practitioner and all the associate level tests in one month and at that point I was feeling very confident about it all, but honestly speaking, the CSA-Pro is tough, took me 2.5 months to cover all the material above and you already know the result, compared to 1 month for 4 much simpler exams.

My last two pence, don’t underestimate this beast, and most importantly don’t make the mistake I made with my time management skills.

And finally, huge thanks ACG and Scott for the course, if it wasn’t for you guys I’d not be where I am today, an apprentice still but encouraged and motivated by some really cool experts in the field, please keep helping us 🙂

Good luck