I don’t know at this point if I’ve passed the test this time, or not. In my experience it generally takes until the end of the day to receive the results of an AWS certification test. I took the test this morning at 8 am and an finished around 2 hours later. Now it’s almost 1 in the afternoon and I’ve had a little time to think about my experience.

Comparing today’s experience taking the test with my previous experience a couple things stand out as the same, and a couple seem different.

I’ll start out with the similarities. First the testing center. It’s a perfectly functional testing center, built into a small office on the third floor of a small office building. I’ve taken a handful of exams here and I associate it with testing anxiety and being quiet so you don’t disturb the other folks taking exams.

From what I’ve gathered there are a wide variety of exams proctored here from real estate, to auditing, to well anything you can get a certification in.

I brought my passport again. The certification guide says that I need two forms of ID. I’m pretty sure that a driver’s license and a credit card with my name on it would suffice, but I’m not willing to take that chance. So I bring my passport with me. I’ve thought of trying the driver’s license and another form of ID, but since I have to hand over my belongings to take the test, I would feel silly handing over a credit card when I’m holding my passport. Maybe I’ll test this theory at some point.

I received the 2 laminated sheets of paper and dry (wet?) erase pens. I understand that I’m allowed to write on these, but not allowed to erase. Seems like an odd rule. I don’t even know what I would write on these plastic sheets.

The exam itself has flagging and review mechanisms built in, so I don’t need to write down questions to return to. I’m sure there are some test taking strategies that use these sheets. I don’t know what it is, and I don’t want to have to worry about writing down the wrong thing.. whatever that might be.. and nullifying my score. I just don’t use them.

As for differences, this time I was far more relaxed about the time. Last time I got really paranoid about not finishing in time and though I did finish, I only had minutes left on the clock. This time I finished with about 15 minutes faster, but wasn’t stressing the time along the way.

Last time, because I was worried about time, I started flagging questions I was spending a long time on and then coming back to them when done. This is a strategy I’ve heard recommended by a few folks. Last time I decided to do it about half way through. This time I just went into the test with this strategy in mind. I flagged one early on and kept moving. Then came back at the end and reviewed all my flagged questions. Oddly enough, I only flagged 4 of the 65 questions. I was honestly surprised that the number was so low when I saw it.

I also feel more calm this time, while I don’t know if I passed or not, the questions didn’t seem as difficult. I believe that I passed the test, but I could be wrong.

In any case I have about 7-8 hours until I expect to have my results. I’ll probably edit in my actual results at the end of this post.

I hope that you are achieving your goals and passing whatever exams you are taking. Enjoy your weekend.

5 PM Edit: I passed!!

The post was not the typical certificate of achievement. I failed the test. But the support that I received from the Linked In community was overwhelming, thank you.

Thank you all of your support!

A good number of you reminded me that failure is only a failure if you quit, otherwise it is feedback. This is great advice and I have taken it to heart. I have scheduled a re-take of the certification test on June 20th.

Many gave me words of encouragement. Wishing me luck on my next attempt. I appreciate that and I have continued studying to make those good wishes into a reality. One area that I have concentrated on is hands on learning with labs. Previously, I had focused primarily on learning theory. Theory is important, but I find that getting hands on experience with something really helps to anchor the theory and help me to remember it.

I was surprised to hear from many of you that I am not the only one to have failed the test the first time taking it. Clearly I found the test to be more difficult than I expected, and it sounds like I am not the only one. For those of you with this experience, I am happy to know that your first attempt was not your final attempt.

There were some of you who appreciated my transparency and posting about my setbacks and not must my success. I appreciate this feedback, thank you for it. It is a good reminder that everyone has setbacks and most of the time we only see the success. Success should be celebrated, but it is not the full picture.

I am humbled and grateful for each and every one of your responses and you have my gratitude. Your support helps to keep me pushing forward.

One way that I’ve been pushing forward is by learning about Agentic AI and I thought that using an LLM to categorize and summarize the comments would be an interesting exercise. It did not disappoint.

You can find the code on my github if you are interested in the details. Using Python, I parsed out the comments and asked Gemini to group them into categories and summarize the comments into those categories.

Categories

Here are the categories resulted from the analysis:

• Category 1: Encouragement & Support: Comments expressing general encouragement, well wishes, and belief in the poster’s ability to succeed in future attempts. Includes simple affirmations like “You got this!” and expressions of solidarity.

• Category 2: Sharing Similar Experiences/Relatability: Comments sharing personal experiences with failing exams or similar setbacks. These comments aim to provide comfort and demonstrate that the poster’s experience is common and surmountable.

• Category 3: Advice & Tips: Comments offering specific advice, study tips, or resources to help the poster succeed on future attempts.

• Category 4: Perspective & Re-framing: Comments that offer a different perspective on failure, emphasize the value of the learning process, or point out the limitations/value of certifications in general. These comments aim to reframe the failure as a positive experience.

• Category 5: Appreciation for Honesty/Vulnerability: Comments directly praising the poster for sharing their failure and acknowledging the vulnerability/courage it takes to do so.

Results

There were 70 comments in total, which is far more interaction that I have gotten before on a Linked In post. This excluded any responses thatI wrote.

• Category 1: Encouragement & Support - 31
• Category 2: Sharing Similar Experiences/Relatability - 15
• Category 3: Advice & Tips - 3
• Category 4: Perspective & Re-framing - 18
• Category 5: Appreciation for Honesty/Vulnerability - 3

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.

These failures impact my confidence in my ability to pass the exam this Friday.

Since this post, I’ve continued to practice my failed answers using flashcards. I’ve also been taking a new practice exam daily.

The results on these practice exams have been mixed. After my initial 56% score that prompted me to write my initial post, I studied and waited a day.

The next day I finished the exam and found that I scored an 80% which is a passing grade. At this point I began to feel better, but committed to repeating the process the next day.

So I repeated the process and when I took the next test I scored a 56% again.

I’m continuing to study and review my missed answers and the test is just days away now. I would feel much better if I was more consistent in my scoring. It’s up one day and down the next and I don’t understand why.

AWS Certifications are fairly straightforward, you study, register to take the exam, pay the fee, and then on the day you go to the test site and take the exam.

The exams that I have taken are 65 questions in length. Fifty of the questions will count towards your final score, while the remaining 15 questions are not counted towards your grade. Instead, Amazon uses them to try out new questions or other things that I don’t know about.

The questions are multiple choice and for the most part a single selection is correct, though there are some instances where you select more than one answer. Like most multiple choice standardized tests, the questions are written to be harder than you might think. They can cause you to second guess yourself and can take some time to really understand what the question is asking you.

I have studied the past couple of months; learned about a variety of AWS services particularly data related ones like AWS Glue, AWS EMR, Amazon Kinesis, and AWS QuickSight. I feel like I have learned quite a bit about these services and have completed labs that have helped to drive home the concepts.

I’ve registered for the exam this coming Friday and in an effort to cement my commitment to that date, I’ve announced publicly my intent to take the test on that date.

Now, I’m five days away and I’m doubting my ability to pass the exam. Part of that is driven by my continued setbacks passing practice tests. I’ve used a few resources to study for the exam:

• Udemy - Complete AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate - DEA-C01
• QA - Cert Prep: Certified Data Engineer Assocaite (DEA-C01)
• Udemy - AWS Certified Data Engineer Associate Practice Exams DEA-C01

These were all good resources and I would recommend them to others looking to learn about Data Engineering on AWS or preparing to take the certification exam.

I stared with the first resource, worked my way through the content, took notes, and reviewed notes in the form of flashcards until I finished and felt good about my knowledge and passed the practice exam.

Then I moved on to the next resource and repeated the process. At first I was surprised by how poorly I did on the practice exam for the second resource. the questions were phrased differently, the content focused on different aspects of the content. But I proceeded with learning the areas where I was weak until I was able to consistently pass the practice exam.

Today I moved on to the third resource and am experiencing the same. I am now faced with another way to phrase the questions and my first attempt resulted with a mere 56% success rate on the 25 question exam.

..and I’m concerned that I won’t pass this Friday’s test.

But I will be working this week to study and be as ready as I can be. Wish me luck!