I failed the AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Exam

Yesterday, I mentioned took the AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate Certification exam. Honestly, I felt pretty good about it after taking it.

Leading up to the exam, I was unsure and had practice tests telling me once day that I would pass and the next day that I would fail. It left me in a place where I was unsure about my readiness to take the test.

The morning of the test and the day before, I passed practice exams with a score of 80% and I felt pretty good. I also discovered an oddity in one of the third-party practice exams that I took. The same question appeared twice in the instance of the exam that I took, but with different answers each time.

This discovery led to look at the reviews of that practice exam provider and I found that other people had similar findings and some other complaints about that set of practice exams in particular.

So on the morning of the testing day I drove to the exam center and took the test. I felt pretty good. The first few questions were difficult, but after I got about 10 under my belt I was moving forward.

There are 65 questions in the exam and as I reached the halfway mark I realized that I had used just over half of the 140 minutes provided. I also had found myself spending way to much time on a couple of questions and marked them for review and moved on.

I was in a time crunch and was concerned that I wouldn’t finish in time, much less have time to go back and review the more difficult questions that I marked for review.

As I reached question 55, I felt better about my time, I had about 25 minutes left on the clock and had only racked up 5 questions for review. I caught up and as long as I kept my pace I wasn’t going to run out of time, but it was close.

I finished all 65 questions with a little under 15 minutes to spare, went back and reviewed my 5 questions and felt good about my test. I even reviewed my first five answers and even changed one of them.

This left me with 5 minutes to go and I marked my exam complete. I took 135 minutes to answer all 65 questions and while I was pretty sure that I god some of the questions wrong, I believed that I had a passing score.

I left, came home, and then the waiting game began.

When I took the cloud practitioner exam, I received my pass/fail indicator at the testing center, I just needed to wait for the details to be delivered the next day.

The Solutions Architect exam didn’t give me any indication of my score at the testing center, but I received the email with my results that night.

So it was time to wait. It turns out that I received my score that night, but it was marked as spam by my email provider so I didn’t find it until this afternoon.

I failed.

I scored a 707 and needed a 720 to pass. I can re-test in as little as two weeks.

I plan to study over the next four weeks and pass with a very good score in a month. I am disappointed by my low score, but all I can do is move forward and pass the test on my next attempt.