How I passed the AZ-900 exam

A short blog post on how I prepared for the AZ-900 exam

TL;DR

This is what I did. I took the “Microsoft Azure Fundamentals” course from the official Microsoft website. It’s around 90% text, 5% video, and 5% hands-on labs, and it could be done within 1 working day, but it took me 2 working days to complete the course. There’s also a small quiz after each major topic, and when I say “small”, I’m not exaggerating (one of those sentences you really need to read in context).

The course and also the exam is divided into 3 parts, with each part having its own weight, as follows: cloud concepts (25-30%), Azure architecture and services (35-40%), Azure management and governance (30-35%). Meaning that you’ll get more questions on topics that have a higher weight. One small note, these are the topics and weights as of writing this blog post.

After completing the course, I tried the practice exam, which you can also find on the official Microsoft website, and that exam has 50 questions with a passing score of 700/1000 or 70%, which is also the score for the real exam. In terms of how many questions the real exam has, well, that may differ per exam. I had 33 questions, but I’ve read that some people only got 30 questions, while others got 35+ questions, but in terms of time, that seems to be the same for everyone, which is 45 minutes for the actual test, excluding the time for reading the instructions.

You can take the exam online or on-site, and I chose to do the exam on-site, because I didn’t feel like preparing a room to do the exam, and setting up the webcam and everything. Also, if for some reason the internet connection is lagging or worse, then I have to deal with that. Not that taking the exam on-site will guarantee that none of the above won’t happen, but it’s just less effort and worrying from my side. Personally, it helps me to just focus on the exam, but your preference may differ.

I booked the exam on 28 May, and I had the exam on 3 June, so I had about a week of prep time. As I mentioned, it took me 2 working days to complete the course, and I still had 4 days (counting the weekend) to do some additional learning. And for that, I went on YouTube, and I watched 3 different videos by 3 different channels. I didn’t finish all the videos, because it was between 8 and 12 hours per video, and also, the majority of the videos are outdated compared to the course on the Microsoft website, which is basically the documentation for Azure. The remaining time spent on preparing was browsing on Google for some test exams, which I was able to find a couple of test exams, and in total, including the test exam on the Microsoft website, I did around 3-5 test exams, for which I passed every single one of them with a passing score of at least 720 with the majority well above 900, so I was pretty confident about taking the exam.

I had the exam scheduled at 12 noon, but I was 45 minutes early, and I could start right away, which I didn’t. I took 2 minutes to review, but I got bored, so I just took the exam. I do have to say that I kind of rushed, and I honestly don’t know why. There was even a pop up after one question asking me to select 2 possible answers, because I’ve only selected one. It even asked me if I wanted to submit just 1 answer, which I guess was quite generous of Microsoft to remind me. That almost cost me one point, but that’s how fast I went through the exam questions. At the end they also showed me a table with all the questions, and the option to review/change my answers, but for some reason I felt comfortable, despite that there were a handful of questions I wasn’t 100% sure about. All in all, it took me a little over 10 minutes to submit the test with a passing score of 905/1000. Not too shabby. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to see which questions you’ve answered wrong, which I would have loved to see.

Bye for now.