gordon.byers.me

So I’ve been preparing for the new AZ-202 exam, and the first place you should always start is looking at the exam objectives. I generally parse them, see what i might need to brush up on (if i’m taking an exam its usually because i think i already know the subject quite well).

Exam Objective Scrape

Given half a chance, i always go to automate everything and this was no exception when i noticed we’d restyled the Exam pages… the Powershell comes out.

#Gordon.byers@microsoft.com
#Powershell script is provided as-is and without any warranty of any kind

param (
    $examNumber = "az-202"
)

$examLink = "https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-$examNumber.aspx"
$questioncaveatphrase="May include but not limited to:"

$azExamcontent = Invoke-WebRequest $examLink

#Create empty arrays to populate
$testAreas = @()
$parsedTestAreas = @()

#Parse the html
$questionTypes = $azExamcontent.ParsedHtml.getElementById("question-types")
$questionTypes.children | % {
    $testAreas += $($_.getElementsByTagName("li") | select-object -ExpandProperty innerText ) 
}

#Iterate through the right html elements to pull out the exam criteria
$testAreas | % {
    $testArea =$_.split(";")
    $areaPrefixPos = $testArea[0].IndexOf($questioncaveatphrase)
    $testArea[0] = $testArea[0].substring($areaPrefixPos + $questioncaveatphrase.Length)

    $parsedTestAreas += $testArea
}

#Create the basis of the CSV file to export
$exportList = $parsedTestAreas | select -uniq | Select-Object @{Name='Phrase'; Expression={$_}} 
$exportList | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "Competency" -Value "Unknown"
$exportList | Add-Member -MemberType NoteProperty -Name "BingLink" -Value ""


$exportList| % {
    #Get bing resource links
    $bingLink = "https://www.bing.com/search?q=azure+-exam+%22$($_.phrase)%22"
    $_.BingLink = $bingLink
}

$exportList | Export-Csv "$examNumber.csv"

It scrapes the contents from the exam page and creates a CSV file with links to find documentation on the exam topics.

I then apply the standard Microsoft levels to say which subject areas i’m confident in. I apply some conditional formatting to make it look nice, and i’ve got my revision prep list ready to go.

So what was the AZ-202 like?

I took the AZ-202 in Beta in order to provide feedback to the exam team for when the exam goes live. The format of the exam is much the same as all the other Microsoft exams I’ve taken, a mix of case-study focused questions, a set of questions you can’t hit previous on, and a bulk of general questions with different answer formats.

The quality of the exam questions, even in Beta was really high. I only commented on about 10% of the questions, the rest were sufficiently clear in their phrasing and testing strategy.

The AZ-202 is the migration exam for the 70-532 exam, and i can tell you – it felt much harder. Microsoft exams getting harder can only be a good thing, it means that holding the associated certification is seen to be of higher value. What really struck me was the depth some of the questions went to, i can’t speak about specifics for obvious reasons… but the exam felt it was really trying to test for the practical knowledge of “has this person actually done this” rather than “has this person read about this and mostly understands it”.

My revision strategy is minimal to say the least. I broadly think that exams should test what you already know, and you shouldn’t dedicate a bunch of time to prepare for an exam in a subject you’re not confident in. True to my self assessment (the 100-400 levels above), the areas i was weakest in were the IOT questions. This is the other good thing about exam certification, there will ultimately be a couple of areas you’ll need to brush up in to provide a completeness of knowledge.