Five days ago, I took the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam and would like to share my experience while it is still fresh in my mind.
Motivation for taking the exam
My motivation for taking this exam was manifold.
The first reason is my belief that having knowledge and being able to work in the Cloud is a great advantage. Moreover, this will probably soon become absolute necessity for Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. Working in the Cloud allows for accessing and sharing vast amount of data which would not be possible by any other means. Being able to create models and applications and implement/deploy these on the web is also of tremendous value.
My initial intention was to take the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty exam. However, after some research on the web I decided first to take the more general and lower level AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam for the following reasons.
- Gaining experience in taking AWS Certification exams: According to many people, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam is the easiest to take. It also has the lowest fee of $100 among all AWS Certification exams. So, for a relatively low fee of $100 one can gain experience with the AWS exam process and be better prepared for the other exams they might want to take. Also, not so long ago this was the only AWS certification exam that could be taken online. However, due to the current situation with the Corona virus, about three weeks ago Amazon announced that all AWS Certification exams will be available for taking online. So, the experience gained from this exam is even more applicable for the other exams, as well.
- Financial incentive: As mentioned above, the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam fee is $100. In comparison, the fee for the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty exam is $300. However, if one passed the first exam, they receive 50% fee discount for their next AWS Certification exam. So, instead of paying the full fee of $300 for their next AWS Certification exam, one will pay only $150.
Finally, why AWS? Currently, AWS is the leading Cloud solutions provider and the services are used by many companies. Thus, getting AWS certification is an added value to one’s overall technical skill set and experience.
Preparation for the exam
After taking so many Udemy courses, I stayed with the familiar and looked there for a course which can help me in preparing for this exam. There are several such courses. After reviewing them, I settled on the course “AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Ultimate Exam Training 2020” by Neal Davis. As with other courses before, I got the course on sale for $10.99 which is a great value for the knowledge this course delivers. The course is for beginners. However, it is a well-structured course and has many hands-on sections besides the pure theory sections, which I found very helpful. I would recommend this course to anybody looking for help in preparing for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.
I spent one week going through all sections and taking all quizzes available (not all sections have quizzes, but most do). At the end of the course there are two full-length practice exams. Each exam has 65 multiple-choice questions. Most of the questions require to pick a single correct answer from four possible choices. Few questions require that one picks two or three correct answers out of five choices. The latter are a small portion of all questions (roughly 10-15%). The practice exams are timed with time limit of 90 minutes. Fresh after completing the course, I decided to take these exams to see what is my preparedness level if I were to take the real exam at that time. I passed the first exam with 75% score – 70% correctly answered questions is required for passing. However, my second score was 68% – just barely below passing grade. Thus, I knew that I am not ready to take the exam.
For the next two days, I went multiple times over the summary portions of each course section and re-took all quizzes available. I also took multiple times (seven or eight) the practice exams. The second time I took the practice exams, I passed both – 80% on the first exam and better than 90% on the second. On the subsequent takes, all my scores were between 95 and 100%. My experience from these practice exams was that for the majority of the questions I had good knowledge and was confident in my answers. However, for about ten questions out of 65 total, I was not confident in my answers and simply had to memorized the correct answers. After, passing both of the course practice exams three times in a row with 100% score, I decided that I am ready for the real thing.
Scheduling and taking the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam
As mentioned above, I took the exam online.
For scheduling of the exam, I followed the guide provided by Neal Davis in the following link: https://digitalcloud.training/2020/03/23/take-any-aws-certification-exam-from-home/. The scheduling is pretty straightforward and doesn’t need much explanation.
When taking the exam, you are allowed to start 30 minute before the exam time for check-in.
Here, I would like to share my experience with the check-in process. There are four steps in the process.
1) Technical check of your system – connectivity, video and audio quality. This process is automated. So, you just need to click the button and after series of tests you are set.
2) Taking a picture of your ID. The two common ID choices are Driver’s License and Passport. I started with my driver’s license. One needs to take pictures using the computer/laptop camera of the front and the back of the driver’s license. Taking a picture of the front was fine, but when I took picture of the back it seemed that the quality of the picture was not good and I was prompted to take the picture again. This is where things got frustrating for me. No matter which way I turned my laptop for different lighting I could not take a satisfactory picture. I think I lost close to ten minutes for these unsuccessful attempts and I got seriously frustrated. Also, the time of the exam was approaching and I started getting worried that I might not be able to take the exam. After the n-th unsuccessful attempt to take a picture of the back side of my driver’s license, I decided to go with my passport instead. Clicking Previous button, allowed me to get back to the selection of the ID type, where I selected passport and was able to take successfully a good picture on the first try. My experience with taking pictures of my driver’s license might be one of a kind – i.e. not many other people have had this negative experience. Regardless, my recommendation is to use your passport if possible. First, you need to take only one picture (50% less chance for things to go wrong) and the passport is much larger which makes taking a picture easier.
3) After the ID picture, one needs to take pictures of the surroundings in the room around your work place – front, back, left and right. Taking these pictures was uneventful and easy.
4) Checking in. After steps 1 through 3 are completed, this is a simple click and you are done.
After you check in, a person will connect with you and will request that you show with your (laptop) camera the work place to ensure that it is clear of any materials one might use for help in taking the exam. You have to also show your hands to make sure that you are not wearing a smart watch or other similar wireless device (these are not allowed for obvious reasons). If you wear eyeglasses, which I do, you have to show them in close view as well (no Google eyeglasses allowed either). Also, no earbuds or headphones are allowed.
After that, the exam page is brought up and you can start.
Exam experience and tips
As in the practice exams, the exam has 65 questions with about the same mix of single- and multiple-correct answers out of multiple choices. However, the time limit (if I remember correctly) is 100 minutes compared to the 90 minutes for the practice exams in the course. When I started the exam, I was definitely nervous. And as it happened, from the first ten questions of the exam three of them were questions where I had difficulty deciding which is the correct answer. These were questions regarding somewhat “exotic” AWS services, which I have not encountered in the preparation course. I did my best to select the answer which had the highest likelihood of being correct and did not spend much time dwelling on these questions. However, in this first 10 minutes in the test, even though I was focusing on answering the next question, in the back of my mind I was thinking that if the questions continue in the same fashion (roughly three out of ten possibly wrong answers) I might not pass the exam. Also, because of being nervous I missed to flag these questions which is provided as an option on the screen for each question. Maybe it was the random draw of questions for my test, but after these first ten questions I did not encounter many more questions where I felt that I am drawing blank.
I was moving at a very good pace spending somewhere between 30 to 40 seconds on question, so in about 40 minutes I have gone through all questions and had another 60 minutes left. After the last question, there were three options: a) review all questions; b) review flagged questions; c) end review (which means finish exam). Since I had 60 minutes left and had not flagged any questions, I went with the review all option. By that time, I have calmed down considerably, because on second reading the difficult questions did not appear that frightening (more on that below).
Below are some observations and tips I can provide based on my experience with the exam and the type of questions I encountered.
1) Questions that are more general in nature and are related to common AWS services and tool.
Among these questions, there are questions that have only one correct answer with all other choices being clearly incorrect. These are the easiest questions to answer. There is a second type questions in this category which seemingly have two possibly correct answers. However, if one considered carefully the two possible choices, one of them becomes the clear winner. These questions are the second easiest to answer. This category 1 questions regarding common services and tool comprises perhaps 50% of the test.
2) Tricky questions (most often related to not commonly used AWS services and tools).
Again, I would separate these questions into two groups. One group is where all choices seem equally likely or unlikely. However, there are key words in the question which are prominently present in only one of the answers. That answer is the correct one with very high probability. The second group is questions where you don’t know what the correct answer is. However, the three of the four choices relate to topics, services and tools you should know if you have prepared well. And all of these answers do not appear to be the correct choice. Thus, the choice you are left with by the process of elimination is the correct one, even if that answer doesn’t ring a bell to you. Overall, there are not many category 2 questions, but under pressure these can make you nervous, which is most likely going to affect how well you answer the next questions.
3) Another category of tricky questions which deserve separate mentioning.
Questions which ask which of the following is NOT correct. These are easy to answer – they are typically category 1 questions. However, what makes them tricky is that by default our mind is focused on looking for correct statements. Because of that, in a situation when you are running against the clock it is possible to miss the NOT part in the question. So, taking time to read carefully and clearly understand all questions is important.
4) Questions with multiple correct choices – select two answers out of five possible.
There were not a lot of these questions on the exam. If I recall correctly, there were around ten of those. Also, these questions tend to be of category 1 questions, so they are not difficult to answer correctly.
5) Reviewing the answers.
As I mentioned above, it should take you anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute to read, understand and answer a question. If you get stuck on a particular question, just go with the first answer that comes to mind and move on. Do not run the clock on few difficult questions and find yourself running out of time answering the easier questions. If you follow this pace, you will have about 30 to 60 minutes left for review. And this is where I think making the mistake of not flagging the difficult (for me) questions actually turned out to be a good thing. I had plenty of time left (60 minutes) and had not flagged any questions. So, I went over all of the questions again. Going over a second time had two effects on me. I had composed myself while answering the questions and now I was seemingly able to understand easier the questions and to see more clearly the correct answers. Also, I was surprised that I did not consider changing any of the answers (except for perhaps one or two). This gave me the confidence that I have done well the first time. Reviewing the answers took maybe the same amount of time as the time spent on answering the questions in the first place. Even with spending significant time on reviewing the answers I still had 10 minutes left. After finishing reviewing the answers I clicked end review and finished the exam.
I passed this exam on my first try and now I am an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.
This is a good first step. Now, I am studying for the AWS Certified Machine Learning – Specialty exam. Hopefully, within two-three weeks I will pass that exam too and will write a post about it.
I sincerely hope that some of what I am sharing here would help other people who are on the same path. Good luck to all!