Couple observations from the exam:
The exam is much harder then I remember (and I passed with 65% three years ago :), took is way before I was ready )
If you scheduling re-certification remember, you need at least 2 week buffer in case you fail the exam.
Exam screen does say 190 minutes (as a bunch of reviews mentioned). The timer on the exam then says 180 and there is a survey after exam is done. It also has a timer with 10 minutes on it.
I finished the questions with 15 minutes to spare and reviewed answers I flagged for 10 min. I thought about requesting additional time when scheduling the exam as english is not my first language. Not sure how it works. I would say if you can do that.
The questions are pretty much what you would expect. Btw, there were three IoT questions one after another totally guessed those.
Quite a few times there would be a question that would offer 4 solution: one complete nonsense, two somewhat ok and the last one really standing out as ideal, but relying on a feature I don’t remember/know existing or not. This takes some guessing.
Most answers require you to reread the question. The answer would be great if the question asked for X, so you look did you missed the X on the question.
I basically had a week to prepare. By now I worked with AWS consistently for 5 years, so I was sure it should not be that bad. I was wrong. Exam got much broader and much harder. I scanned through SAA course in one day, and SAP in another at 1.3 speed thinking all I need is a small refresher. Then took ACG practice test and got 52%. Well, I went into the panic mode at this point. Retook SAP course, watched a bunch of specialty courses on ASG – advanced networking, ACS, AWS Config. Went through Dojo pages for Services and service compare, some AWS FAQs. Retook the test and got 80+%. The problem with ASG practice test though, you would not trust it on the retake. A lot of questions are repeated and you remember the answers. It would have been much better to have 2 or more not intersecting question sets.
I planned to take AWS practice test in the morning the day before the exam, Well, CertMetrics turn out to be down. So I went to AWS Learning and looked their AWS SAP preparation course. They say it takes 4 hours, but you can do that in 1 hour. The lectures there are nothing new, and all the text is available just below the video. But the question they asked are a must, and the video review of those questions is great, this is what you want from this course.
CetMetrics became available at about 8 pm. I took a practice test, waited for the results email for 30 minuts. It said 70%, and it made me feel a bit better. Usually you score low on this one.
I had exam scheduled for 10 am. In the morning before the exam I went through Exam tips from ASC SAP course. Took an exam, got "Congratulations" screen. It is a weird feeling when you leave an exam with no proof you passed it, and the AWS Cert pages still shows exam as "future" and displays "Cancel" and "Reschedule" buttons available for the whole day right after CertMetrics site outage 🙂 But today morning the site was showing the results- 841. The feedback is useless though. It just showed that none of the areas needs improvement, whatever it means.
1 Answers
Congrats Yuriy and thanks for the write-up!