My AZ103 (Certification) Experience

#microsoft #azure #certification #az103

It's month 2 of the year 2020 and I have earned my second certification. I cracked my first - AZ900 (Microsoft Azure Fundamentals) in January followed by AZ103 (Azure Administrator Associate) last Friday.

Summary

All in all, I skipped no question (there are no negative marks). You need a score of 700 to pass, I scored 841 for AZ900 and 760 for AZ103. There's no way to know specifically which questions you failed and why, and there's also no way of knowing what the max score is.

The one thing you are provided is a score report, with a graph that shows, out of 100%, the percentage of correct answers you got for a specific subject (VM Management, identity management, etc.).

Exam Format

As far as I have seen and read from various blogs there is no fixed number of questions that Microsoft sticks with, but it is around 45-55 and the number of a specific type of question(s) may vary from person to person

I had a total of 47 questions in total, they included:

1 case study (i.e.: "Here's a business scenario with a bunch of requirements, and now answer these questions based on the provided information/requirements")
Multiple-choice, with different types of questions, like:
- Single-answer w/ multiple choice
- Up to X answer w/ multiple choice
- Fill-in-the-blank
- Order the answers in the right order for what you need to achieve (with some answers that do not fit)
No Labs. Yes, Azure has temporarily removed labs from AZ103 due to some issues. Every blog post and videos that I had checked had only bad things to say about the lab experience; that person had to go through during the exams. But even if they reintroduce labs, they are pretty straight forward and easy.

The Process

I spent around 2 weeks to prepare (for AZ103) and had a paid subscription for Cloud Academy. I followed the learning path that they had specially curated for AZ103, along with the lecture courses it also includes Practice Labs, Challange Labs, and a Practice Test(which I failed horribly when I gave it for the first time). It was a hustle to cover all the topics within 2 weeks for me if you are new to the concepts I would suggest giving it more time. But then again depends on how quickly you can grasp the concepts. I spent around 3-4 hours on weekdays and close to 5 hours on weekends.