vCAP5-DCD: FAIL– Here is what I learnt today

All I have to say is “Wow, that's not even close to what I was expecting!”

First off, time is a real factor:

As I was reading other peoples blogs, they kept mentioning that they finished with only 2 minutes left I just kept thinking to myself I write fast (I do most exams in sub 30 minutes) so this won’t be a problem for me.

I clicked finish with 6 minutes left, and I watched the clock like a hawk once I only had 2 hours remaining and was less than 1/3 done (not a great feeling).

There are 3 Types of Questions:

I knew about the regular pick one / two type of questions and the design style questions but I was quite surprised when I got my first of 17 scenario type questions.  These are drag and drop style where there is a list on the left you have to match up with things on the right based on a scenario / diagram given to you, sounds simple right… wrong!

I found some of these to be harder than the design questions.

What makes these so tough was some times it a 1 to 1 match, some time its a 1 to many match and sometimes you don't have to match everything.  The harder of these seemed to be asking 6 – 8 separate questions all related to the same scenario.

Design questions take a long time:

I spent well over 20 minutes on most of the design questions, and get ready to re-do some of them more than once. 

After spending about 15 minutes on my second design question, I got an adobe error message on my screen and the design engine froze.  I clicked “no” to stopping the script then finally had to call the admin in to reboot my PC.  This ate up about 4 minutes of my time, but when the PC came back up, I had to start the question over again.

On another question, after spending a good 20 minutes on it, I noticed one line that changed the design.  I started trying to drag things to the garbage can, but some of the items “stuck” together so I had to hit start again and spent another 10 minutes re-creating the design.

Some VERY technical questions:

I didn't expect to see anything uber technical on this exam, but there were a few questions that dealt with advanced options / configuration settings.

So what now:

I have to wait 14 days to re-take this exam, so for the next 14 days I will be focusing on the Forbes & Scott’s Design Guide and the Clustering Deepdive by Duncan and Frank along with reading some of the more technical readings outlined on the exam Blueprint.

I won’t be spending anymore time with the “Official” Certification Guide, which should be called Guideline instead.  I put too much faith into this guide and I paid the price for it.  It does cover all of the topics on the exam, but doesn't have enough of the technical details to help you answer most of the exam questions.