I just completed the exam, and thankfully passed 🙂
Nothing heard yet from Google, so I don’t have a certificate or anything like that to share, but reading other people’s stories it seems usual for that to take a day or so.
To prepare for the exam I used:
ACG’s Google Certified Associate Cloud Engineer Certification, which was free for a while on Udemy, and because I got through my AWS CSA-A with the help of A Cloud Guru.
Qwiklabs and particularly the GCP Architecture Challenge
Practice, practice, practice using a GCP free tier account.
Reading through best practice guides for IAM etc.
I only watched 36% of the Udemy/ACG course, as I’m finding that watching videos is pretty far from being my preferred learning mechanism. I wish Qwiklabs had more depth and breadth as I really like the hands on open book approach (and particularly the challenges); but I guess it’s much easier to make and sell videos of talking heads.
The most useful part of the ACG course was the two practice tests. Thanks Mattias for the very detailed explanations of why particular answers are right/wrong. The ACE Exam Report Mega-Thread was also useful in terms of framing what to expect.
The exam itself is structured as 50 questions over 2 hours. It took me about 50m to go through them, and I didn’t bother reviewing as I was pretty sure I’d given my best answer first time through (and there weren’t any helpful cases where a later question leaked information that was helpful for an uncertain earlier question). All of the questions asked for a single choice from 4 options. Many of them took the 2×2 format of right/wrong service x right/wrong option. There was a lot of stuff that hadn’t come up in my study, but where there were at least 2 (and sometimes 3) obviously wrong answers.
On completion it’s a binary pass/fail. Unlike the AWS exams there’s no extra detail on areas of strength/weakness.
2 Answers
Congratulations.
I will make sure that Mattias sees this post.
Rusty
Moderator & Coach
Hey Chris! Congrats on your pass! 🎊 Sorry you didn’t engage more with the course videos, but I totally understand that each person just learns differently. And what you described doing with the practice exam questions I wrote is exactly what I’ve hoped many people would do, because it is an efficient way to close gaps in understanding. Generally, I expect people to do that after watching all the videos and doing all of the labs and challenges, but it’s all cool. 😎 Also, I really appreciate hearing that you got no multiple response questions, only single-response ones. Good info.
I think it’s good for others to see that there are many paths to success, so I’m happy to link to this post from my ACE Exam Report Mega-Thread.
Keep being awesome!
Mattias