I failed the exam today with a 673. I followed all of the lectures and all of the labs, but the ACG AZ-900 course alone is not going to be adequate to pass the test. Perhaps it was my bad luck in the draw of questions, but it was very heavy on what ACG seemed to be less throrough in its coverage (Cost management models, governance, policies, network security). SLAs NEVER came up at all in my test; I had maybe four Concepts questions, maybe five or six Services questions and about the same on Solutions. Thus, the remaining 75% of the test was focused on the material I mentioned. And even with ACG describing MS’s blueprint on test composition, the depth of the material was inadequate. Also, the test I took was 45 minutes, not 60 minutes, and the number of questions is mis-leading. Yes, there may be ~44 "numbered questions", but with the multiple parts per question it was closer to 60 questions. I’m not angry at ACG, as this test isn’t important to my career, however I do want to ensure other students read a lot more of the Microsoft material in regards to the ‘non-technical/soft’ aspects of Azure.
2 Answers
I partly agree with Gary. Although I barely passed the exam yesterday with 716, I realized, that by only taking this ACG course, I was not well prepared for the test. I can confirm that I also got a lot of questions regarding pricing models, policies, monitoring, ARM and security in much more detail than it was covered by the course. I can just recommend to students that you pay much more time just "playing around" in the Azure playground just clicking through all the tools and products mentioned in the course, especially those which do not belong to the core compute, storage, DB products like Azure Advisor, Service Trust Portal, Monitor, Sentinel, etc.
Hi Gary,
Thanks a lot for your feedback. To be honest, this is what I love about our students at ACG. You tell us when something works or not. First of all, don’t worry about failing, but it sounds like you aren’t anyway. I have failed AZ-104 three times now, but will get there.
In terms of the exam, we don’t get any special access to it being from ACG. The only way we find out what is on the exam in terms of timing and questions is by sitting it. And even then we obviously can’t tell you exactly what is on it. Once you pass the exam, you can’t sit it again either, ever. My point is that we rely on the feedback to know what the exams are like and how the course aligns, in large parts.
Over the 20 months the course has been published, thousands of students have passed just with the information in the course, but occasionally there are questions on the exam that just comes across much harder and much more in depth, than what we usually see. As regards to the split of questions, again we are at the mercy of the outline, which has guiding percentages for each section.
Again, I really appreciate your feedback Gary. It is the only thing that can make me aware of these things. I hope you take the exam again and pass 😊
Cheers,
Lars
I took the az-900 today, and I was one of the unlucky ones :(. I scored 686 …. :(. The draw of questions I got were tricky and hard. 3 questions were on AAD, which completely threw me off. Around 15-20 questions on the test needed more in depth knowledge on the subject matter to answer them correctly. Lars I do have to compliment you on your upbeat delivery of the course. Any chance you will create a prep course for az-104?
Hi Gary, Sorry to hear that you just missed it. While ACG is serving me very well for my AWS exams, I did not use ACG for my AZ-900, so I can not agree or disagree with you. However, I would like to share the course that I took that helped me pass AZ-900. It was on Udemy, called ‘Azure Fundamentals: AZ-900 Certification +Practice Questions’ (https://www.udemy.com/share/101zhk3@Pcr9JzLbzOXer_PYBlM3oDM-Cdp8z1k61h7wbm5rXeqso0Od62J37qMOcxTAawI5/). I thought this class was structured beautifully, and it helped me pass. Maybe you can take it to supplement what you have learned here using ACG. Good luck, fellow guru!