Passed AWS Solutions Architect Professional – June 2021

I had done Associate Certification in 2017, and thought of going for the next level. So I prepared during 2019, but in 2020 the Certification version changed.

Anyways, the Assoc Cert was due to expire in December 2020, and I started at my own pace. I chose Linux academy as my platform then, and started with Adrian Candrill’s course (44 Hours or so!). The pandemic started, and there were a lot of changes in work to keep up, and somehow it got ignored. The assoc cert expired in December too. Got lazy, and in the mean time LA was merged with ACG.

Restarted my studies in March 2021. Finished Scott’s course & Stephen Marreck’s course from Udemy. Had gone through older versions of whitepapers an year earlier, and I didn’t study them again.

Started with mock tests this week. Used Jon Bonso’s practice tests & Stephen Marrek’s from Udemy. Failed the first test on last Friday and scored just 30%! So I took leaves from Monday to Friday, and started revising the topics again. Failed some more mock tests, but went through the topics which I got wrong, again – this time went through aws documentation for each of those topic too. Prepared notes to refer later.

Finally on Wednesday, I failed the acloudguru practice test with 64%. But, that was a great confidence booster. Because, that sample exam was at least twice as tough as other samples.

Thursday, went through all my notes & cards prepared. Done a few more tests, with just the intention of improving the speed of comprehension.

Exam day:

I anyways had the ESL accomodation approved, so extra 30 minutes – which I wanted to utilize maximum during the exam. I wrote the exam in a Pearson centre, not at home.

I answered the easy ones first, and flagged the longer questions for the second round. Once finished easy ones, went through the flagged ones, taking around 3 minutes each question. Finally, once all those got finished, reviewed all 75 questions again. (this caught at least 4 questions I answered wrong, because I hadn’t paid attention to some minor detail. The extra time for ESL came handy here).

There were a few questions about workdocs, appstream, workmail, Worklink… A few questions about FSx for Lustre and lazy load vs bulk load etc – had to guess some.

Finally,

35 Questions: I could confidently answer & I’m sure they are right.

32 Questions: I could eliminate all but two of the options, and had to guess the correct one out of two. (50% chance or more, because I am reasonably sure about some of them.)

3 Questions I could eliminate all but three of the options, and had to guess one out of three (30% chance).

5 Questions I had no idea about how to answer (I guess all of them should be wrong).

Scored 83%. Would have failed if I got just five more wrong.