Passed Solution Architect Professional

Hello Cloud Gurus!

I’m happy to say I passed the SA Pro (old exam) earlier this week after studying with Scott’s new course, so I think I’m possibly one of the first people to take the exam after studying from his new updated course. The course can be used to study for either the existing exam which is expected to be available until early 2019 or the Beta which is available until Dec 3rd, whichever you decide to do.

My approach was as follows:

Listened to all the lectures at least once and repeated any lectures that I needed more time to understand. I paused the videos and made a load of notes and diagrams on the areas I was not familiar with.

I completed all the challenges at least 3 times, until I was totally comfortable with why certain choices were incorrect and why.

Early on in my studies, I watched the AWS Certification Exam Prep Guide by Mattias which was really useful in explaining how to approach the multiple choice questions with some really good examples on how to identify incorrect answers. This course applies to any of the AWS exams but is particularly useful for the Professional level where the correct answer doesn’t always jump out at you and you need to compare 4 or 5 possible answers. This course is available to all ACG members: https://acloud.guru/learn/aws-certification-preparation

When approaching the questions, I drew out an answer grid marked A-E and crossed off the obviously incorrect answers for each question, this really helped me to focus on only the remaining options. On the day, I drew this out before beginning the exam so that I didn’t waste any precious seconds.

Sample Questions

In addition to Scott’s challenges, I did the official sample questions 3 times, researching any incorrect answers.

White Papers

I read through the Security, Storage Options and VPC Networking white papers… Scott recommends a lot more than these and if I had given myself more time, I would have read a lot more than those and I would recommend reading all the white papers he mentions! Unfortunately the last 2 weekends before the exam I had some unplanned friends and family visits which I was unable to avoid and this meant I lost around 3-4 days when I had expected to be able to study…

In hindsight, if I had given myself more time to prepare, I would also have watched the recommended re:invent deepdive videos, especially on areas like Direct Connect which is difficult to get hands-on experience with and also on areas like Networking and HA, just to consolidate everything. I definitely felt less prepared for not doing this!

AWS Practice Exam

The night before the exam, I took the official practice test, it consists of 40 questions and cost $40, but if you have already achieved one of the Associate certs you can use one of the practice exam vouchers they give you, so most people should be able to do the practice exam for free.

Beware with the Practice exam though because it is much, much more difficult than the real thing, if that is even possible and it can make you feel that you are not ready to take the exam even when you are!

I scored only 65% and almost ran out of time. It really made me feel like I wasn’t ready which was a little bit depressing because this was at 6pm on Sunday and my exam was at 9am the next day!

In hindsight, I should have done this at least one week before the exam to have time to review the questions properly and focus on my weaker areas.

I’ve read on our forums that many people successfully passed the real exam after failing the practice one, but I was still worried that I was going to get a borderline score…

From what I’ve read, a lot of people got at least 10% more on the real exam than they did on the practice. A big problem with the practice exam is that the questions and answers are poorly worded which makes a lot of the questions extremely confusing. – The real exam is much more clearly worded and far less ambiguous.

On the day I got 80%. It isn’t an amazing score, but I was pleasantly surprised and I was just happy to get a pass! So if you are getting around 65% on the practice then you will most likely do "OK" in the real exam, but for your own sanity, please do not do it the night before your exam! It’s my own fault but it was totally depressing and I was extremely annoyed with myself!!!

Here is a comparison between my practice exam and the real scores and you can see there is quite a lot of variance:

Practice: Overall Score: 65% Real Exam: Overall Score: 80%

Practice: 1.0  High Availability and Business Continuity: 83% Real Exam: 72%

Practice: 2.0  Costing: 100% Real Exam: 100%

Practice: 3.0  Deployment Management: 100% Real Exam: 85%

Practice: 4.0  Network Design: 100% Real Exam: 42%

Practice: 5.0  Data Storage: 33% Real Exam: 81%

Practice: 6.0  Security: 62% Real Exam: 85%

Practice: 7.0  Scalability & Elasticity: 33% Real Exam: 81%

Practice: 8.0  Cloud Migration & Hybrid Architecture: 50% Real Exam: 100%

Test Center Network Issues

During the exam we lost network connectivity around 3 times. This was a big concern because each time, my machine got rebooted and a couple of times it took a few minutes to get the exam back. When the exam came back, I had usually lost the last answer so had to select my answer again. I was worried that I was losing precious time on my exam during the reboots, but each time when the exam screen came back the clock had not changed so I needn’t have worried.

English Not Your First Language?

English is obviously my first language, but if it is your second (or third!) language, you can request an extension of an additional 30 minutes for all of your exams. There’s a great blog post here which explains how to do that, you need to do this in your certification account before scheduling the exam:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/30-minute-extension-your-aws-certification-exam-garcia-lozano/

Hopefully that is useful for some of you studying for the SA Pro, it is a tough exam but not impossible! And a big thanks to Scott for an excellent course!

Good luck all and keep being awesome!

Faye