Exam Taking Strategies
Sleep well, eat well, arrive a few minutes early to the testing center.
It's a long exam period (2 hours?), the guy next to me was done in an hour.
Keep track of your time, mark a tough question and go back.
Remember the relative grading.
Exams are on a curve
- You want to aim for above 70%
- There's no set passing score
- If you get a very low score you could still pass
- You get your score
Tips
- Read the question carefully
- Seriously
- All of it
- Read the answers
- Use process of elimination
- Refer to other questions
- you can go back and forth between questions
- Time management is critical
- When in doubt GUESS
Test Axioms
- "Single AZ": NEVER the right answer
- Using AWS managed services should always be preferred
- RDS over setting up a database on EC2
- Fault Tolerance is DIFFERENT THAN Fault Tolerance
- HA == Multiple AZs
- Fault Tolerant = What happens when everything everywhere goes down
Sample Exam Question 1
I took a photo of it.
Strategy: eliminate 2, then focus on the key features of the problem (highlighted in red).
Sample Exam Question 2: SELECT TWO
Strategy: Eliminate 2, validate remaining two.
Watch out for where one is "all of the above" lol
Sample Exam Question 3: SELECT THREE
- Which is NOT right?
Sample Exam Question 4: SELECT TWO
Sample Exam Question 5: SELECT TWO
- Eliminate Single AZ
- Since cost is a priority, we use exactly what we need: 4 instances
Sample Exam Question 6: Elimination
Probably not on SA exam, probably on developer
Need to know a lot: - What are mappings, parameters in cloudformation, are AMI ids different or the same?
Sample Question 7: Elimination
Sample Question 8: Need to know RTO and RPO... how can we deduce...
- Specific to Disaster Recovery Plan
- Recovery Time Objective
-
Recovery Point Objective
-
Gotta know this one!
Sample Question 9: Eliminate 2
Remove 2, know what each one is.