Welcome back,
and from the very start, this course
has been about more than just the technical side.
So this is part one of a two-part lesson set,
and in this lesson
I'll focus on some exam technique hints and tips
that you might find useful in the exam.
Now, in terms of the exam itself,
it's going to have questions
of varying levels of difficulty,
and this is also based on your own strengths and weaknesses.
Conceptually though, understand that on average
the AWS exams will generally feel
like they have 25% easy questions, 50% medium questions,
and 25% really difficult questions.
Assuming that you've prepared well
and have no major skill gaps, this is the norm.
For most people, this is how it feels.
The problem is the order
of the difficulty is going to feel random,
so you could have all of your easy ones at the start,
or at the end, or scattered
between all of the other questions,
and this is part of the technique of the AWS exams,
how to handle question difficulty
in the most efficient way possible.
Now, I recommend conceptually
that my students think of exams in three phases.
You want to spend most of your time on phase two.
So structurally, in phase one, I normally try to go
through all of the 65 questions
and identify ones that I can immediately answer.
You can use the exam tools, including mark for review,
and just step through all of the questions on the exam,
answering anything that's immediately obvious.
If you can answer a question within 10 seconds
or have a good idea of what the answer will be
and just need to consider it for a couple more seconds,
this is what I term a phase one question.
Now, the reason that I do these phase one questions first
is that they're easy, they take very little time,
and because you know the subject so well,
you have a very low chance of making a mistake.
So once you've finished all of these easy questions,
the phase one questions, what you're left with is the medium
or yellow questions, and the hard or red questions.
My aim is that I want to leave the hard questions
until the very end of the test.
They're going to be tough to answer anyway,
and so what I want to do at this stage
in phase two is to go through whatever questions remain,
so whatever isn't easy,
and I'm looking to identify any red questions
and mark them for review, and then just skip past them.
I don't want to worry about any red questions in phase two.
What phase two is about is powering
through the medium questions.
These will require some thought, but they don't scare you.
They're not impossible.
The medium questions, so the yellow questions,
should make up the bulk of the time inside the exam.
They should be your focus
because these are the questions which will allow you
to pass or fail the exam.
For most people, the medium questions represent the bulk
of the exam questions.
Generally, your perception will be
that most of the questions will be medium,
there'll be some easy, and some hard.
So you need to focus in phase two, which represents the bulk
of the exam, on just these medium questions.
So my suggestion generally is in phase two
you've marked the hard questions
for review and just skipped past them,
and then you focused on the medium questions.
Now, after you've completed these medium questions,
you need to look at your remaining time,
and it might be that you have 40 minutes left,
or you might only have four minutes, or even less.
In the remaining time that you have left,
you should be focusing
on the remaining red questions, the difficult questions.
If you have 40 minutes left, then you can take your time.
If you have four minutes, you might have to guess
or even just click answers at random.
Now, both of these approaches are fine because at this point
you've covered the majority of the questions.
You've answered all of the easy questions,
and you've completed all of the medium questions.
What remains are questions
that you might get wrong regardless,
but because you've pushed them all the way
through to the end of your time allocation,
whether you're considering them carefully
and answering them because you have 40 minutes left
or whether you're just answering them at random,
they won't impact your process
in answering the earlier questions.
So if you don't follow this approach,
what tends to happen is you're focusing really heavily
on the hard questions at the start of the exam,
and that means that you run out of time towards the end.
But if you followed this three-stage process, by this point,
all that you have left is a certain number of minutes
and a certain set of really difficult questions,
and you can take your time safe in the knowledge
that you've already hopefully passed to the exam
based on the easy and medium questions,
and the hard ones are simply a bonus.
Now at a high level, this process is designed to get you
to answer all of the questions that you are capable
of answering as quickly as possible, and leave anything
that causes you to doubt yourself
or that you struggle with to the end.
So pick off the easy questions, focus on the medium,
and then finish up with the really hard questions
at the end.
I know that it sounds simple,
but unless you focus really hard on this process
or one like it, then your actual exam experience
could be fairly chaotic.
If you're unlucky enough to get hard questions at the start
and you don't use a process like this,
it can really spoil your flow.
So before we finish this lesson, just some final hints
and tips that I've got based on my own experiences.
First, if this is your first exam,
assume that you're going to run out of time.
Most people enter the exam
not having an understanding of the structure,
and most people, myself included,
with my first exam, will run out of time.
The way that you don't run out of time
and the way that you succeed is to be efficient.
Have a process.
Now, assuming that you have the default amount of time,
you need to be aware
that you have two minutes to read the question,
read the answers, and to make a decision.
So this sounds like a lot, but it's not a lot
of time to do all of those individual components.
You shouldn't be guessing on any answers until the end.
If you're guessing on a question,
then it should be in the hard question category
and you should be tackling this at the end.
I don't want you guessing
on any easy questions or any medium questions.
If you're guessing, then you shouldn't be looking at it
until right at the very end.
Another way of looking at this is if that you are unsure
about a question or you're forced to guess early on,
you need to be aware
that a question that's later on, so further on in the exam,
might prompt you to remember the correct answer
for an earlier question.
So if you do have to guess on any questions,
then use the mark for review feature.
You can mark any question that you want
for review as you go through the course
and then at any point, or right at the end,
you can see all of the questions which are flagged
for review and revisit them.
So use that feature.
It can be used if you're doubtful on any of the answers
or you want to prompt yourself
as with the hard questions to revisit them
toward the end of the exam.
Now, this should be logical,
but take all of the practice tests that you can.
One of my favorite test vendors
in the space is the team over at tutorialsdojo.com.
They offer a full range
of practice questions for all of the major AWS exams,
so definitely give their site a look.
One of the benefits of the exam questions created
over at Tutorials Dojo is that they are more difficult
than the real exam questions, so they can prepare you
for a much higher level of difficulty,
and by the time you get into the exam,
you should find it relatively okay.
So my usual method is to suggest that people take a course,
and then once they finish the course,
take the practice test in the course,
follow that up with the Tutorials Dojo practice tests,
and for any questions they get wrong,
it can identify areas that they need additional study.
So rinse and repeat that process,
perform that additional study, redo the practice tests,
and when you're regularly scoring
above 90% on those practice tests,
then you are ready to do the real exam.
And at this point there are all
of my suggestions for exam technique.
In the next lesson, I want to focus on questions themselves,
because it's the questions and your efficiency
during the process of answering questions
which can mean the difference between success and failure.
So go ahead, complete this video,
and in the next video, when you're ready,
we'll look at some techniques on how you can really excel
when tackling exam questions.