Exam questions difficulties & how to solve in exam

[Nageshrathod]

Hello,

I recently took the EX 374 exam, but unfortunately, I didn't pass. During the exam, I found some of the questions to be quite challenging. I understand that discussing specific exam questions is not allowed, but if there are any documents or resources you could suggest that cover difficult scenarios similar to those in the exam, I would greatly appreciate it. Any guidance or suggestions that could help me prepare better for the next attempt would be invaluable.

Thank you.

[Trevor]

Congratulations Nageshrathod on attempting the EX374 exam.

You didn't earn a passing score, but the outcome wasn't all bad -
you verified those concepts/subjects that you knew, and those
that you didn't know or understand so well.  

I"m not sure which questions you're referring to, that you mentioned
were quite challenging, but those are the type of questions that give
this exam, and all Red Hat exams, their value and recognition in 
industry.

I know you're asking for recommendations about how to prepare
for you next attempt, but I'd like to ask a question before offering 
any suggestion.  Do you feel that there were any questions on the
exam that were not addressed/covered in the DO374 course material? 
I'm not asking for the details on any specific question - just any and
all questions in general on the exam.  Did the course material cover
all the concepts that were assessed by the exam?

[Nageshrathod]

Thanks for responding, 

Yes, one question that was not covered in DO374 was asked there.

The course covers the topics, but not the difficulty level that I faced during the exam.

[Trevor]

Nageshrahod,

Thanks for your reply. 

It's unfortunate that there was even 1 question on the
exam, that contained a topic/subject, that was not covered
in the DO374 course. I feel certain that's something the
course development team would not try to excuse or defend.  
However, considering that there are 28 objectives that could
be covered on the exam, that one question is not alarming - unless
that question was comprised of several items that were not
covered in the course.  These comments are mine alone, and do
not reflect those of any group or department within Red Hat!

With the experiences that I've had with Red Hat exams,
and preparing for them using the official Red Hat course
content, the coverage is  mapped very well to the items

that are assessed on the exams.   I've not attempted the
EX374 exam, however, it would certainly deviate from 
the Red Hat methodology, to provide material that develops
learning at one level, and then deliver an exam that assesses
that learning at a higher level.  Please do not receive my
comments as directly or indirectly suggesting that your
experience is untrue.  You took the exam, and you were
kind enough to share your feeling and experience.  I'm 
in no position to dispute the veracity of your comments!

At this point, I would like to strongly encourage you to 
start preparation for another attempt at the EX374 exam.

In your preparation, let me also encourage you, in case
you didn't have this mindset before, to learn the material
as though you were going to have to begin working on a
consultting assignment the next day, versus preparing
to just gain a passing score.  It's "almost" impossible not
to have the desired outcome if you know the concepts
on a level that would enable you to go out and immediately
provide value to some organization!  As I'm sure you 
already know, that's where the real test comes.

Thanks again for being open and tranparent with your
information.  Much success on your next attempt!!!

[Travis]

@Nageshrathod -

I would like to say that @Trevor gave some very good advice. I also want to remind you that the coures Red Hat develops are to teach concepts and skills and are not merely take this class to prepare for the exam. Often the contents of the course cover the exam materials and so so much more that the objectives on the exam.

I will agree that sometimes how the questions are presented seem like we haven't covered the content directly in the course, but I guarantee you that the basic topics were covered and possibly the implementation or specific application wasn't discussed with a 1-for-1 guided exercise or end of chapter lab.

I have taught this course many times and delivered the exam a couple of times (less now that there are remote exams), so I definitely know how tricky this exam can be. My advice is to write down as many questions as you can remember from the exam, look at the score and areas where you did poorly and map those back to the course and hands-on labs in the course. From there, I also encourage you to extend those exercises a little more and try to perform more difficult tasks or make up some of your own tasks.

I have created a repository that I use when teaching the course and share with students ...

https://github.com/tmichett/do374

It has plenty of example playbooks (including some from the DO447 - the previous version of this course) and it has a basic outline and PDF of the course with demos I use for students. This should also give more insight on things.

Keep in mind, some of the objectives, you need to build on knowledge and also there might be more than a single way to create a playbook to accomplish a given outcome. Some of the trickier things in this course are getting a really good handle on the JINJA Filters and processing the variables and data.

The other challenging thing can be building your own collections and execution environments. I encourage you to play with those and different scenarios around them to create or extend them further and go "off book" to try and build new and unique hands-on experience with the lab environment you have (providing you still have access). I also encourage you to look at the documentaion as there are some examples in there that can help provide "triggers" or "reminders" when you are taking your exam. 

Knowing where to find things quickly can be just as important when a time constraint is in place. Again, the materials in the course are meant to help with understanding and teach concepts that you build on. The exam is meant to challenge you and is an attempt to determine if you've obtained mastery of those skills. The course is "Advanced Ansible Automation and Best Practices" so the idea here is you can take what you learned and extend it for real-world applications. So, while we might teach and use modules X, Y, Z in the course, you might be required to use modules A, B, C for the exam. These differences also hold true for things link filters, queries, and lookups. Knowing how to read the documentation to use modules, filters, lookups, etc. is part of the "Mastery" as this shows that when new modules or features become available you know the approach to figure out how to use them.

[Trevor]

Travis -

My comments set the table.  Your commants, cooked the meal!!!

I hope Nageshrathod appreciates the generosity you've shown
by sharing your resources.

[Nageshrathod · Accepted solution]

Thanks you so much guys for such kind and supportive response.
For sure I will keep your words in mind during preparation

[alexajo]

This is an excellent write-up. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and knowledge on taking ROL courses. I could not agree with you more. I have three white-boards behind my desk that are only for Red Hat training that I use to map concepts and I also keep open notepad ++ to make sure I am taking each concept further than the student guide does. I think its just experience taking the exams more than anything else prepares you for taking exams. 

[Jyothivel]

I am going to attempt the exam myself. I have gone through the DO374 course and feel good about it, but I have one question, what documentation is allowed during the exam. Can I access docs.ansible.com. I am basically trying to find out how can I get syntax when you write the playbook. I believe ansible-navigator doc should help but is there anything else, I could leverage for playbook creation.

[Travis]

@Jyothivel -

You will not have any access to the Internet. Any documentation you have will be local documentation. So while you might have the same documentation as docs.ansible.com, the navigation might be somewhat different as the "search" and other features don't work the same. Again, the on-system documentation is always available or installable, but Internet based documentation (product docs, etc.) are generally downloaded for offline consumption on the Additional Information page. I would highly encourage watching the videos on preparing for a Red Hat exam and what to expect for our exams (if this is the first exam you've taken).