Yesterday I took the PE124, preliminary exam for the RHCSA EX200 exam. This morning I found out I failed it. I can take a failure, but the experience wasn't the best. The one thing I took from it was the exam format and how to navigate around. However, I didn't have to boot to the USB Live environment. In a browser, I went to the exam and click a red Start Exam button. This must be different from the actual exam.
Anyway, I used Sanders and Asghar Ghori's certification guides. For months, I spent hours daily doing labs. I feel very confident with NFS, resetting the root password, firewall-cmd, SELinux, containers, autofs, storage with LVM/Stratis/VDO... and I read in reviews of those guides that if you can do all the labs in those books that you are ready for the EX200 exam. Since I can do all that work without looking up the process and feel confident in my skills I thought I'd take PE124 to see how I do.
The failure wasn't that bad, but it was how I failed. There was nothing that I studied on the preliminary exam. 2-3 of the questions were worded in such a way that I was very confused on what needed to actually be done. Not only that, but one question made NO sense at all. I am going to lookup in my guides more on the topic of that question to see if I might have missed something. I don't want to say what the question was in case there is an NDA.
I guess I just feel defeated right now and confused. Is the preliminary exam that much different than the actual exam? I really put in the time to learn this material so to take an exam and be caught off guard like that... well, I'm not sure what to think.
