I've completed the survey. Now the long story.
I'm an RHCA and this was a personal goal of mine. After getting RHCA I've convinced my boss to pay for RHLS since I had 50% discount.
Payment interface is different from the subscription, it is a pain to buy it in corporate environments, I had to get my bosses bosses boss to pay for it since he was the only one with a card. As you all know, the higher up the ladder you go the busy people are so it is pretty hard to get their time.
Very happy I got it, started to learn and prepare for ex425. Scheduled my first exam and failed, on one section of the exam it seemed I was poorly prepared. I've retrained, did the material again and failed again even tough I was sure I've completed all topics.
After the 2nd attempt I've asked the cert team to check the score and they reported it was correct. Even tough I didnt agreed with their evaluation I decided to give them credit and doubt myself.
My ego didnt let me quit, I've paid the exam from my own pocket and failed again even tough I've completed every point in the exam and rebooted the machines to check.
The thing is that in all 3 attempts, one section of the exam (the low hanging fruit) did not score 100% no matter how I solved it. Tried the procedure from the manual, everything worked but the result says ~60%.
This time I had no doubt that there is nothing wrong with my skills. As you can see in the thread below there are lots of errors in the course.
https://learn.redhat.com/t5/Red-Hat-Learning-Subscription/DO425-Typos-errors-and-bugs/td-p/6170
Asked support here from fellow learners, encouraged by @JS_Learning I've raised another ticket and this is still under investigation. After about 1 month after opening the ticket I didnt get any response. I said, ok, perhpaps they forgot to update me and asked for an update. Nothing, not even a "we are working on it". I understand the exam integrity must be protected but "we are still working on it" doesnt affect exam integrity.
I think after loosing 6 months with this exam ( first time the exam was cancelled due to neetwork errors and it took RH about 2 weeks to give me my retry) and 3 tries deserves at least answer.
The thing is there are other people (some of them RHCA's, if that counts for something) which they said that 425 scoring is tough to explain even tough some of them passed and they have no reason encourage others to take this exam.
While preparing for the 425 I've raised an ticket and complained about the start time of the lab with a screenshot in which it clear that the lab took almost ~45 minutes to start. If I do that lab 10 times I lose 7h of lab time. Support replied to me with a quote from the course stating that the lab starts normally in several minutes. I'm not a native english speaker but in my opinion 45 minutes is not several but ALOT of minutes.
I had luck with a Red Hater which responded on reddit and said that lab performance will improve with the new interface in the begging of may. I took 2 weeks break but this saved me a few lab hourse.
From what I've seen on other forums and even on this one, people are starting to move away from EX425 on version 3 and wait for a version 4, if there will be one. This is a bad thing because the DO425 is great in regards to what you learn.
In regards to support, according to RH COVID-19 response all exams validity has been extened to January 2021. Mine were not, I created a ticket and I'm still waiting. To their credit ,support, after the initial lag the support answered me that they are working with an internal team and I should have at the begging of next week.
Another issue with support is that they copy/paste the same response in the ticketing system several days in a row without making any real progress. This is signaled here in one topic I cannot find at this moment, has happened to me also and was also pointed out to me by a customer. This seems to be a current practice since has been signaled by people in different countries.
Since we're talking about feedback, I did my own investigation about the network issues with the kiosk exam. Even if everything is ok with the network when you scroll with the mouse wheel you get the network error. If you are software scrolling ( using the Firefox bar for example) then you DONT have the network error.
I've posted the investigation here
https://learn.redhat.com/t5/Red-Hat-Learning-Subscription/About-network-issues-with-kiosk-exam/m-p/1...
and, at the suggestion of @cschunke , sent the same feedback to RH training team. Never got a response.
For me, RHLS is a great product, lots of really good material but has a really poor support. I really hope it improves.
Have a nice week end everyone.
