Today was my second attempt on the AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate exam. My initial attempt was about 6 months ago. I was in a hurry to get it over and done with and despite the fact that I did not feel ready, I went ahead and sat the exam. I found the exam to be rather tough as I do not work with AWS day in day out but despite that, I was disappointed to fail the exam by 2 or 20 points. The passing score then was 720. Given the change in circumstances after that, I decided not to attempt the exam until later. Unfortunately I kept procrastinating for eternity.
For the initial exam, I prepared using the A Cloud Guru videos and Udemy questions by Jon Bonso. I did not finish all the questions as I had no time. There was a collection of 6 exam sets and I only did 3 of them in a rush so the failure was not a complete surprise.
I finally decided in the end of the year that It was time to achieve the goals I had set forth in 2019 – one of which was to pass my exam. This time round, I decided to listen to some Videos in Udemy by Stephen Marek and also videos in Linux Academy. I found that the videos went deeper than the knowledge I got from the A cloud guru website. I also reviewed the questions in Udemy again and this time round, was able to finish the set of 6. The secret is not in answering the questions but in reviewing the explanations as to why the answer is correct or wrong. I made sure that I reviewed both right and wrong answers for all 6 sets.
I did still find the exam challenging but at least this time, the questions made sense and I knew what to look out for from all the practice tests that I had attempted. I was so relieved to see the “PASS” score once I clicked complete exam.
I have a list of subjects that I would like to focus on next and will keep you posted along the way. For now, it’s time to take a breather.
CyberSecFaith 