Understanding exam expectations

[DeepakRamanath]

Hi All,

Had my very first attempt at the DO374 and also happened to be my very first RedHat certification exam. 

Failed at the DO374.

In the exam I was able to validate all the answers to ensure the objectives were met, yet I failed. Now, I do not understand how this can be possible. 

So my broad question to all those who have taken the exam and passed. How do one guage the exam expectations? As we all know in Ansible we have many different ways to achive the same outcome. 

Many thanks in advance.

[Trevor]

Hello DeepakRamanath,

I know you indicated that you failed the exam, but do you feel
that you learned anything in the exam attempt that will help in
the next exam attempt?  If so, while you didn't achieve a passing
score, you didn't fail the exam!!

Be encouraged that through the proper preparation, you can and
will be successful in achieving a passing score on the exam!  I haven't
taken the exam, but I've taken enough exams to know the usual outcome
when the preparation targets the exam objectives!

Much success to you on your next attempt!!!

[Travis]

@DeepakRamanath -

Sorry to hear about your exam attempt, but this is something very common. It would have been better for you to take an "easier" exam as EX374 is quite difficult (especially if this is your first introduction to Red Hat exams). So you had to get used to the format as well as being able to handle "advanced Ansible" techniques. 

One thing I have always told students is to study the exam objectives and think of how you will be tested. Our DO374 provides an excellent course to teach Advanced Ansible techniques, introductions to ansible-navigator, execution environments, Ansible content collections, and the Ansible Automation Platform with Ansible Controller and private automation hub. The course also dives into some advanced Jinja using templates, filters, lookups, and queries, but only touches the surface on how to use them and get more information for other filters/lookups/queries. 

As for the exam itself, while we can't discuss specifics, there are some Youtube videos produced by Red Hat on pointers and what to expect when taking an exam. I instruct my students to look at the objectives and map them to exercises, labs, and lecture content in the course. I also suggest they "extend" the content from the book and look beyond just knowing how to repeat the GEs/labs in the book and try your own thing.

Finally, I stress to read the question carefully and do exactly what is told. If you are to create a user called "Jon Smithe", you can't create "jon smithe", or "John Smith", or "Jonn sMithe", it must be 100% exact what you are asked for as not only must you create a user, you must create the "correct" user. Many argue that well, I knew the process and knew what to do, so what if I spelled something wrong as it is close enough (I knew how to create a user). This just doesn't work for our certification exams because it wouldn't be good in the real world to be "close".

I have some sample contents and notes available on Github that you are free to use to help you study for the exam. I would highly encourage you to think back to the questions you were asked and evaluate your score on areas where you can focus and easily gain more points.

In general it doesn't matter how you get there (as you mentioned Ansible has multiple ways of achieving  automation lineinfile vs. blockinfile, etc.), but it does matter that you complete instructions. Just as in our RHCSA courses where changes must be persistent, playbooks must result in the correct outcome. So you are often asked to create a playbook names XXX or YYY and put it in a certain location with a certain name. If this isn't done, the playbook cannot be executed, so it doesn't matter that you could run your playbook or that you configured the server manually, it must perform as expected and as instructed in the exam directions.

https://github.com/tmichett/do374

https://github.com/tmichett/RH294

https://github.com/tmichett/AnsiblePlaybooks