Certification Prep

While I do not believe certification demonstrates competence, it does show focus and diligence and is desirable to some customers and employers. These articles are meant to help others along the paths I have already taken.

Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I

Become a Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

This is about my journey to pass the Platform App Builder certification exam. Yours will probably vary, and I hope this article is part of it.

For me, Platform App Builder is my third Salesforce certification. I passed the Administrator exam in 2018 and the Platform Developer I certification in 2019. 2020 I was too focused on expanding the Logic20/20 Salesforce Capabilities to study for an exam.

I have admitted in the past, and will repeat for clarity here, that much of my blogging is driven by having searchable notes on how I accomplished something so that when I need to do it again I can readily remind myself of what worked. My certification posts show a pattern that is working: Work with the tool, takes a course, take a diverse set of practice exams, then do it for real. Patterns are great for planning, though the devil is in the details, and I will get to those in just a moment.

Before getting to the good stuff, it is important to note that there is a key part of the pattern that is missing from those previous post, perhaps the most critical aspect: a genuine interest working with the tool that I want to be certified in. The value of this is clear from my first certification for the WebLogic Portal (RiP). I didn’t study for it at all, I just took the exam and passed (barely). I took the exam because it was required by the company that acquired the product. I had passionately worked with it for several years, and expected passing would be easy. It wasn’t, because certification exams are more about knowing things than doing things. Doing them does help to know them, just not as much as I would have thought. Anyway, it is that interest in doing that motivates me to acquire the knowing necessary for certification.

As a mentor, I frequently hear the same concern from people that are learning something new outside of their day-to-day work: It can be difficult remembering things by only reading or hearing about them. Learning exercises are often not enough as they are structured for success and the simple step-by-step instructions become a validation in following instructions rather than an acquisition of the knowledge necessary to perform the task. One thing I had done to rapidly accelerate my abilities in WebLogic Portal was to spend an hour each morning reading the community posts and answering questions. Not only questions I already knew the answer to, but also the ones I did not, by figuring it out, validating it, and then responding. Years later, I applied this technique again after becoming an Informatica Cloud Master. As many people know, solving real-world problems helps to lock in the learning. What I learned with WebLogic and Informatica is that there a plenty of real-world problems to solve beyond my own daily work.

In the case of Salesforce certifications, I can honestly say the best study technique was getting in to the Top 10 on the Trailhead Community Answers Leaderboard.

Beyond the community participation, the App Builder certification was the first one where I did not have frequent “ah ha!” moments while taking the trainings. The first (and last…I repeated it a day before the exam) training I took was the free one Salesforce offers on their Certification Days page. It is certainly worth taking for the pattern tips of how the exam questions are structured, such as (paraphrasing) “If there is a choice that suggests anything other than a declarative approach, it isn’t that one” and “Watch out for choices with multiple parts where most are correct. They must all be correct.”

I’m still a big fan of Udemy. I am also frugal, so I enrolled in Mike Wheeler’s Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification Course during one of the frequent sales. It’s a good course, though a lot of material is dated and it gets a little annoying to hear him complain about features that have long since been improved. The course does not include a practice exam, but I have found that courses that do have few more than the number of questions on the actual exam. The problem with that, is that there are way more questions available, and each exam consists of a random set of questions (within the ratios as described in the official study guide).

The App Builder Certification is one of the more popular ones. I think this is partly attributed to it being in the “Developer” category of certifications while requiring no knowledge of coding, and partly because Salesforce heavily emphasizes that coding isn’t necessary and should be avoided. Having been a consultant for a software vendor, I understand the value of declarative solutions because it is safer for regular vendor updates. I will also say that knowing nothing about the implications of technical choices can be a huge disadvantage even if everything is done declaratively. But I digress…

The practice exam package I went with from Udemy was Salesforce App Builder Practice Test [325 Questions] WINTER’22. There is great diversity in the questions, though there are several that are the same general question with subtle differences. They are spread through 5 timed tests. I didn’t do the actual math, but I think that while the total of all questions are in the correct exam ratio (23% Fundamentals, 17% UI, 22% Data Modeling, 28% Logic & Automation and 10% Deployment), I believe only 2 of the sets are correctly spread across topics. For me, reporting is a weak other (I generally delegate that work), and I found myself failing some of the practices where reporting questions were too heavily waited.

The value of practice exams is not memorizing the answers (don’t, because they change to avoid just that). The value is in learning weak points and shoring them up with some reading or Traihead modules.

As I mentioned, the App Builder is a popular certification, and there are a lot of other offerings on Udemy for practice exams. I made the mistake of buying one several months before using it and could not get a refund. I did get a refund on another that looked really good in the description but was outdated and contained several answers I knew were wrong. There are also several free video dumps on YouTube, and I found that many were also inaccurate, besides being the wrong medium for this type of studying (at least for me).

So, to summarize:

  • Get interested in what you are studying for
  • Attend one of the free Salesforce prep trainings (you also get a discount on your exam with the training!)
  • If you don’t get to build apps often at work, go help people on Trailhead to gain practical experience
  • Pick a good training course on Udemy when it is on sale and check it right away for quality and get a refund if it sucks
  • Pick practice exam set on Udemy with lots of questions and check it right away for quality and get a refund if it sucks
  • Follow me on Trailhead (not really necessary, but you may find some interesting answers)
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Preparing for (and passing) the Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I Exam (WI19)

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

(Originally published at InfoWorld, this version has an additional section on test taking tips.)

I’m ambivalent about certifications. Because I spent enough time in school for the equivalence test validation to be embedded in my psyche I have enough certificates to fill a two-inch binder clip. Because I have been working in the real world long enough to know what most of them truly reflect, I actually display them all in two-inch binder clip with a sticky-note on top that says “Pick One”. Anyone who has multiple certification knows that not all are of equal value in terms of proof of knowledge. I have one from an enterprise vendor that is a household name, very fancy looking with a hologram in the middle. It is the result of showing up for class every day for two weeks and the check clearing. Yet I learned a great deal achieving it. Another was acquired as a pre-requisite for continued employment following a merger, which was easily achieved with no study and only a third of the allotted test time. The next took a solid year of daily study and was taken in hopes of leveraging it to leave the employer that required the previous one. 

My most recent certification was one of the more difficult to study for: The Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I (WI19). While I have plenty of practical experience working with Salesforce, there are many aspects of the product that are required knowledge for certification that just haven’t come up for the businesses requirements I have been fulfilling. However, I enjoy working with the product and Salesforce has done a good job of convincing decision makers of the value of certification as an indicator of ability that I wanted to have it to please those decision makers. So here is how I went about it.

Trailhead

Trailhead is an invaluable resource for learning Salesforce, regardless if you are seeking certification or not. I use it all the time to keep up on new and updated features and whenever I run across a requirement where a tool that I’m not thoroughly familiar with may be helpful. Also, in 2018, Salesforce move the certification verification to Trailhead as well as the maintenance exams.

If you have not already created a Trailhead account, do so before reading on. If you already have a free Developer org, sign up at Salesforce Trailhead. If not, go to the Developer Edition site and get yourself one first. Pro tip: Don’t use your email address as your user ID for the Developer org, even though that is the default value on the sign-up form. User IDs must be unique to all of Salesforce, not just the org.

On Trailhead, navigate through the menus under Credentials > Certifications then to the specific certification you are interested in (or jump to the Platform Developer I (PDI) page). Here you will find the Exam Guide, which is a good way to understand the structure of the exam. There is also a link to a Trailmix. Trailmixes are groupings of Trailhead training modules and super badges created by Salesforce and other Trailhead users. These are a great way to begin preparation for a certification. If you have been working with Salesforce, many of the modules will be topics you are already familiar with. Skip those according to your own confidence level. I will add this personal anecdote about skipping Trailmix modules: The second-lowest score I received on the exam was in a category I work with regularly. The exam questions were about aspects that I no longer consciously think about, similar to how it may be hard to give directions with street names for a route you travel daily because you traverse them on autopilot. A refresher may be useful.

Udemy

I used Udemy to great success for the Salesforce Administrator’s exam by taking an excellent preparation course taught by Francis Pindar and then a practice test course with three practice tests. Preparing for the Developer’s exam was a bit more daunting, mostly because the nature of the exam has evolved in the last couple of years and the courses have not caught up with it.

Before you get sticker shock looking at the Udemy courses, here is the strategy to pay a reasonable price for Udemy courses in general. Create your account on Udemy and take one or two free courses (there are many worth doing). Eventually (at longest up to three months) you will receive and offer for all courses for a flat rate per course that is quite reasonable. If your employer has a discount program that includes Udemy (such as Fond), you can get an even better price. I only paid $9.99 per course through my company’s Fond program.

As of this writing, the best Udemy course I found for the Developer’s exam is Salesforce Platform Developer 1 Certification Course by Deepika Khanna. It seems to be an Apex developer course that was later re-purposed for certification prep. As such, most of the content is there, though it may not be clear how it translates to the exam. There are also several course files that are not referenced in the course. One of these is a practice exam that has all of the answers in Word. Most of these questions are also in Salesforce Certified Platform Developer practice Tests, so I suggest you not read the Word document until after you have gotten everything you can from the practice exams.

I had taken another prep course on Udemy that had a great outline, but I did not find it a good learning resource as evidenced by the abysmal score I achieved on the first of the two practice exams.

The practice exam on Udemy is not the greatest, though it does reflect the actual exam process well, if not the questions themselves. There are a lot of spelling and grammatical errors in the practice exams and the mistake I made was to assume that an incorrectly spelt answer was automatically wrong. The spelling issue is not seen in the actual exam, so it is just an issue with the practice exam author.

Another lesson about practice exams is to avoid the temptation to take them early. There are only so many questions and you can end up memorizing the answer to those rather than learning the topic well enough to answer similar-but-different questions on the actual exam.

Other practice exam sites

The site I got the most from for drilling on test questions is a ProProfs Quiz, appropriately titled  Salesforce Platform Developer 1. Questions are added and updated occasionally. There were 131 questions available the final week before I took the exam. The same spelling issues seen on the Udemy practice tests are there, and many of the same questions. I also noted questions from the course quizzes from the exam preparation course I took, though not sure who copied who there. One thing to be aware of is that not all of the questions have the correct answers. Believe it or not, that is a good thing if you use the strategy I did. Every time I took the exam, I would research the questions I missed to better understand the concepts. This helped a lot. I also would save the final page with the answers to a PDF that I stored on my phone and reviewed when idle.

Some other useful practice sites:

  • Salesforce Certification Dev 401 #1 (also on ProProfs Quiz) is for the older exam. Most of the questions are still relevant, as the new exam has more topics than the old one.
  • Salesforce Certified Platform Developer 1 Quiz at Salesforce Tips, Tricks, & Notes is short but some of the questions are really hard. The order of events question was especially helpful in getting this topic down.
  • Simplilearn’s Free Salesforce Platform Developer I Practice Test is very hard, probably because they sell a certification preparation course. It requires some contact info, but I found they only send you ads a couple of times. No telling if they sell the info, though. Which is why I keep an anonymous account for such registrations.

Key topics to study

  • There are many questions related to Triggers and Order of Execution. Memorize this as best you can.
  • Knowing the Data Model well will boost your score. If you are good at memorizing things, the link will be sufficient. Otherwise, hands on experience (at work or on Trailhead) is the best way to embed the key points into your subconscious. I studied this the least and it was my highest scoring area from a combination of project work and Trailhead modules. YMMV.
  • Apex Testing has a multitude of sub-topics and there are some over-lapping concepts that can be confusing if you don’t regularly use this aspect of Salesforce.

Test Taking Tips

(This is a bonus section for readers of my LinkedIn or Solutionist blogs)

The process of answering the test questions is just as important as the approach to preparation in ensuring a passing score. I first go through the test quickly, reading each question and response options and answering those that are immediately obvious to me. I then go through a second time, answering the questions skipped the first time through and marking for review any that I don’t feel 100% confident about. An advantage to this approach is that sometimes one question is worded in such a way that I easily remember the answer and it reminds me of the correct answer to another, related question.

I then go back and review all of the questions marked for review, re-read the question and answer and asses my confidence. I do this in order of the exam questions because I still might leave it marked for review on this pass. The ones I was still unsure of on the review I then re-review. Finally, I go through the test from start to finish, reviewing each answer.

While this may sound very time consuming, I usually still finish with 20 – 30 minutes to spare.

Some final comments about certifications

The Salesforce employment market is heavily slanted towards certified applicants, so if you really like working with Salesforce and aren’t already in your dream job (or are a consultant who is always pursuing new clients), Salesforce certification is a must have. The Salesforce Administrator certificate I find the easiest to achieve, and if you are serious about Salesforce development I recommend getting both certificates because knowing enough administration to be certified will help you in designing better components.

No matter how hard or how easy a certification is to obtain, almost all are proof only of knowledge. In general, the application of knowledge is where the value is. As someone pursuing certification, continue your learning after certification. I find participating on the support discussions and completing Trailhead modules regularly to be a good way to grow beyond the day-to-day tasks.

And for employers, please weigh overall experience with certification achievements. Someone that has years of technical experience on multiple platforms and coding languages will be able to become very proficient in Salesforce in a short period of time, and someone with several certifications who has little experience outside of Salesforce and all within a small variety of orgs may not be the right fit for a complex implementation.

Finally, my own score on the exam was not in proportion to my actual capabilities. The exam results are broken down by category. In one case I scored very low in an area that I use regularly and frequently advise others on. In another case I scored quite high in an area I rarely use and most of my learning was academic. Having previously passed the administrator’s exam, it is no surprise that my best categories were the areas that overlap.

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Salesforce Certification Profile Screenshot

Tips to Pass the Salesforce.com Administrator Certification Exam

Scott S Nelson1 Comment

I came late to Salesforce, only working with it for the last five years. The upside to that is that I don’t have a bunch of old habits that need to be unlearned in order to take full advantage if this awesome platform. The downside is that I am having to re-brand myself after having risen to the top of a technology space that was decimated by a combination of merger-madness and a vendor-victimization of the acquired customers. Salesforce will eventually fill that nixed niche for both the technologists like myself and the customers who need something that is flexible, scalable and has strong communities for both technical and business users. A big part of establishing oneself in the Salesforce space is certification, and the Salesforce Administrator certification is the foundation for anyone interested in professionally working in the field.

While I have over a hundred certifications, most are from third-party testers rather than the vendor because my experience of vendor certifications is that they require memorizing things that take less than a minute to find on Google and are only used two or three times in a career. And they cost a lot of money. However, they are also a way to stand out in a field where there are many people who rely entirely on search results for their understanding of how to get things done and believe that complex issues can be solved by only re-using the result of the first link that matches the immediate need.

The Salesforce Administrator is definitely one of the more honest certifications in that if you have been working regularly with the product for a couple of years you can pass the exam with little or no study. Not because there isn’t a bunch of those esoteric questions that only the admin-savant knows, but because the passing grade is only 65% and the credential verification site only shows that you passed and not by how many layers of teeth-skin you made it by. 65 is a fair percentage of what you would learn if you were doing the job correctly for some period of time or are adept at acquiring skills quickly through a combination of classroom learning and real life experience (which is how I passed, with much better than a 65% score).

The steps I will outline here are meant for whether you have real-life experience or not. Experience is not necessary to become certified in most technologies, which is why in many (other than Salesforce and a very few others) certification has become meaningless. It is, however, necessary to become good at applying the knowledge that is being certified. As is experience with other technologies and roles outside of technology.

If you haven’t already, go sign up for a free Salesforce Developer account. As soon as you sign up, you will get an invitation to join Trailhead. You can join Trailhead without the free account, but you will want the free account to better grow your skills. Trailhead provides a whole lot of free training is well-designed and relevant to real-world requirements. At the start, I suggest completing a bunch of the beginner modules. They are easy to do and instructional, with many hands-on exercises that will get your confidence up. Confidence is key to test-taking. If you are working with Salesforce in the real world you can be prepared for the certification exam simply by completing all of the beginner and intermediate admin modules for Sales Cloud, providing you do them in a compressed period of time and test soon after completion.

If you are one of those people who are really good test-takers and are interested in high scores regardless of how practical your knowledge is there are several free prep sites on the web. Here is a list of the ones I found fairly useful, even if some of the questions are more about impressing people on the knowledge of the site owner than in preparing for the exam:

https://www.exam-labs.com/vendor/Salesforce

https://www.proprofs.com/quiz-school/story.php?title=salesforce-administration-test-adm201

http://www.certifiedforce.com/sample-questions/administrator-quiz-1

https://www.udemy.com/free-salesforce-admin-certification-course-introduction/learn/v4/

https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-admin-practice-exam/

Personally, because of the number of questions that are not on the exam and are both esoteric and overly-clever (i.e., “tricky”), I found the above sites useful in building knowledge but not very helpful for confidence.

For me, the best resource for preparing for the exam was Udemy. There are a few free courses, and you can combine them will all of the above and have a good chance of passing. If you want to guarantee a pass, I suggest two courses.

The first is https://www.udemy.com/salesforce-certified-administrator-201-2017. I can’t say enough good things about this course. It is extremely well-designed and engagingly presented. It covers every aspect of the exam and provides practical and understandable demonstrations.

The second Udemy course isn’t really a course (IMO). It is https://www.udemy.com/salesforce-administrator-certification-practice-tests. There are three tests in the course that you can take as many times as you like and the review your wrong answers with both the correct answers and explanation why it is correct. If you are not in a rush, you can sign up for a Udemy account and then wait for one of the frequent sales they have and take the courses for under $15 each, a bargain considering Salesforce will charge you $20 bucks for one practice quiz.

Finally, when the time for the exam comes, be prepared with a strategy. The practice tests should give you an idea of how much of the allotted time you personally will need. I have to variations of my certification exam strategy based on how much of that time is required.

If you find you use most of the allotted time in practice exams, when the real exam comes along take in four phases. In the first phase only answer the questions you immediately know the answer to going from first to last question. In the second phase, go through the unanswered questions as quickly as you can and check the review box for all those you don’t feel confident about. For the third phase, review all of the questions you check for review and take your time until you are confident you have either chosen the best answer or truly don’t know the answer. The final phase is to review the questions from start to finish until your time is down to the last minute.

If you generally finished quickly in the practice exams with a passing score then on exam day go through all of the questions in order and flag any that you are not 100% positive of. Then go back and review those questions and revise the answers where necessary. Finally, quickly go through all the questions again and double check yourself.Facebooktwitterredditlinkedinmail


© Scott S. Nelson

Techniques to Prepare for and Pass the TOGAF® Certification Exams

Scott S NelsonLeave a comment

There is a great deal of discussion at the various virtual gathering places of Enterprises Architects (and those that want to be) on what certifications are the most important to have. The answers vary a great deal, mostly depending on perspective. Those who are already EAs respond with the assumption that everyone has almost as much education, experience and influence as they do, and recommend the pursuit of areas that will enhance their abilities. Then there are those who own a particular framework who suggest that the certification they offer is the most desirable for any EA (which I sometimes agree with except for the “most” quantifier). Then there are the practical bunch that point out that TOGAF® is the most widely recognized certification and the framework that many of the others are based on. In essence, if you are competent in TOGAF® you can easily become competent in most other frameworks.

Background

Once someone suggests TOGAF®, the thread moves to how to pass the certification (though many other threads about other frameworks and why certifications don’t matter will continue even though the original poster is ignoring them by this point). I recently achieved TOGAF® certification, and wanted to share how I did it before I catch the disease that seems to affect many TOGAF®-certified EAs where they mutter about how easy it is and just take a course or read a book. I also like to write, so you’ll have to suffer through some of my prose to get everything that worked for me (and some things that didn’t).  However, if you are as impatient with my writing as I am with most others, you can skip to the end for the outline and links. Go ahead, it won’t hurt my feelings…much.

I’m also not going to go into a deep review of the exam structure or material covered. This is more about where to get the material and how to use it than the material itself. The structure of the exam will be reviewed in terms of how to approach in a manner that will help you pass, and the material will only be referenced at a high level for context.

While I have worked with enterprise architecture for a dozen years, it has always been with the various custom frameworks of clients and employers (when any at all) which tend to use internal terminology and definitions. For example, one employer labeled “Information Architecture” as the practice of how users interact with information and focused on the use of wireframes, navigation and content taxonomy. Another employer referred to “Information Architecture” when they were discussing the design, designation and distribution of data and its containers. Neither organization listed “Information Architecture” in a glossary, so if you didn’t happen to already know their definition you could become very confused (and appear very stupid) in discussion about “Information Architecture” and the organizations capability to contribute Subject Matter Experts on the topic. Having been confused and appeared stupid in training class for an employer’s internal Enterprise Architecture Framework over this difference in nomenclature, when the time came to chose between TOGAF® Level 1 training and TOGAF® Level 1 & 2 training, I opted for the first. For my particular learning style, this was a good choice, even if made for (perhaps) the wrong reason.

Approaches

If your learning style leans towards interactive exchange with an instructor and other students or you have no experience with TOGAF®, I would highly recommend taking a Level 1 class as a starting point. Level 1 focuses mostly on the terminology of TOGAF®. In TOGAF® terms, Level 1 is the Preliminary phase of the ADM. The Level 1 exam covers all phases of the ADM, and touches on all of the other sections to assure that an individual certified at this level can have a conversation about TOGAF and not be totally lost. The exam is multiple choice, and the questions are at least twice as hard as any of the practice exams I have seen. So if you opt for the classroom instruction, review the course materials thoroughly afterwards. Many courses will give you the exercises performed during the class broken out by sections. I found it helpful to repeat the exercises to note which areas I did not score perfectly in and review those topics again.

If you are one of those people who absorb information very quickly or have been following the actual TOGAF® approach in your day-to-day work, going straight to a combined Level 1 and Level 2 class will probably be more to your liking and benefit. Level 2 of the TOGAF® exam and certification is a deep dive into how to take all of those terms and apply them in real-world scenarios. Level 2 is an open book exam, where a scenario is presented, a challenge is described based on the scenario, and then four approaches are described and your job is to pick the best one. One of the four is totally wrong, and the others have degrees of correctness. The training class I attended had us answer the class exercise questions by putting them in order. While this is not how the exam is done, I found that approach very helpful in choosing the most correct answer on the actual exam. One exam approach that I found invaluable was to break down the question into TOGAF®-specific areas and then see which answer addressed the most of them according to the document.

Don’t let the open book aspect of the Level 2 exam fool you into complacency.  While it does not have the rote memorization aspect of the Level 1 exam, the answers all sound pretty reasonable if taken alone. Also, for those who have dealt with Enterprise Architecture where TOGAF® was not followed some of the answers that sound most real-world are the 0 point responses. The key to this part of the exam is to know the structure of the TOGAF® document so that you can quickly locate relevant sections and verify how closely an answer matches the document. Another point to remember is that in addition to the document, there is a general approach core to TOGAF® which is the collaboration between business, technology, Enterprise Architecture and Project Management.

Of course, there are those who learn perfectly well from only reading (or reading in addition to work experience) and they are welcome to ignore my training course recommendations. In fact, for simply passing the certification exams (as opposed to scoring well, which I have a preference for), you can get by without a course, too, if you follow all of the suggestions described here using the written material and any practice exams you can access.

I would highly recommend taking the exams separately as I experienced some dismay during the Level 2 exam as I noticed which answers I got wrong on the Level 1 exam, which is a distraction.

Planning is Everything

One note from my personal experience is that having taken the path of a Level 1 course and certification followed by a combined Level 1 & 2 course (there was no Level 2-only course available to me at the time) I assumed that I would be able to simply take the Level 2 exam to complete my full TOGAF® certification. Turns out I need to have discussed this with the training company before taking the course as I received a voucher for the combined exam instead of just the Level 2. I could not exchange the voucher, and the testing center would not allow me to take only the Level 2 with that voucher, even though I had taken the Level 1 course with the same training company and the exam with the same exam provider. Fortunately I don’t know if this rigid process would have resulted in my not having been certified if I failed the Level 1 exam the second time around, though I’m sure it would have entailed a great deal of time consuming communications to correct that situation had that been the case. I suppose it is very much in the spirit of TOGAF® to never assume that all parties think about the same model from the same viewpoint.

My Ultimate TOGAF® 9 Certification Preparation Process by the Numbers

OK, so here it is, as promised:

Before the exam…

  1. Read TOGAF® 9 Certified Study Guide
  2. Attend a course
  3. Read the TOGAF® 9 spec cover to cover
  4. Review the course materials

During the exam…

  1. If possible, take the Level 1 exam and Level 2 exam individually
  2. If not 100% positive about the answer, mark it for review
  3. For Level 1, do not spend more than two minutes on any question for the first pass
  4. Complete all answers in the level before reviewing
  5. If you don’t know an answer pick one at random and mark it for review
  6. Once completing all the answers, begin the review with the first question. Some of the answers will now be obvious from later questions, so go through the marked questions quickly the first review and answer the ones you know are confident about
  7. On the first review, do not spend more than 1 minute per question
  8. If not 100% certain, leave marked for review
  9. On the second review, take your time and answer to the best of your ability, leaving those you are not 90% sure of marked for review
  10. Review until you run out of time
  11. For Level 2, list the parts of the question that map to TOGAF® then check each answer for addressing those items. The one that addresses most of those items is the most likely answer

Conclusion

In all honesty I can’t say that any one source for how to pass the exam is going to work for everyone capable of passing. I hope that I have given you one of the better approaches, including the suggestion to look for blog entries and articles and discussion that have further tips specific to your needs. What I have described here worked very well for me, with the key advice I found at one site being to look for the answer that was the most TOGAF®-ish and that was generally the best answer. The studying approaches I described are what allowed me to apply that excellent advise.

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