How I cleared AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate in under 4 weeks
I am writing this post after my post on LinkedIn got a lot of traction with more than 30K+ post views and a lot of people very curious to know how to prepare and attempt this exam.
I was motivated to do this exam by one of my friends after he cleared it a few months back. I actually wanted to do AWS Machine Learning Specialty and started to read for that exam, but being new to AWS the terminologies were very new to me and I decided to do CSAA before starting to prepare for ML Specialty.
Also differential cost of doing only AWS ML specialty and AWS CSA-A + AWS ML specialty is just $30. Since doing only ML specialty exam costs $300, but once CSA-A is done, we get a 50% off on our next AWS certification.
I started my preparation on 08-September-2019, being Vijayadashami, and typically people will start a new skill on that day. I had no prior working experience on AWS platform and did not have any knowledge on any of their cloud services. I had worked on Azure briefly, but it is limited to launching a new server and working on it.
The preparation
A Cloud Guru (ACG) Course (https://acloud.guru/learn/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate) was my primary learning. I saw around 45 minutes to 1 hour of video initially and did not rush too much.
Along with that I did labs that were subscribed in the ACG course from Qwiklabs (https://www.qwiklabs.com/). They provide you with step by step walk through of each of the modules like EC2, S3, and so on which was discussed in the videos by ACG. Along with that they also provision an instance in a temporary AWS account to do hands on for around 1 hour where we can work on and log off without actually having to use our own AWS account. But even if we do not have a Qwiklabs, the free tier of AWS should be fully sufficient to learn for the exam.
Once I completed around 70% of the ACG course content, till the VPC section to be precise, I started taking full practice tests. ACG provides with 2 set of full practice tests, and Udamy (https://www.udemy.com/course/aws-certified-solutions-architect-associate-amazon-practice-exams/) course had 7 full practice tests. After each practice test, I reviewed the wrong answers and I maintained an error log where I marked all the questions that I picked the wrong option.
TutorialDojo (https://tutorialsdojo.com/comparison-of-aws-services/) has this amazing cheetsheet where they had summarized the key difference between the services of AWS which was very useful for me.
After three weeks I had the confidence that I would pass the exam and scheduled the exam on a Sunday evening 8 PM to 10 PM so that I could focus over the weekend for the final preparation.
On the day before the exam and on the day of the exam I wrote three practice tests, I went through the entire VPC portion of the ACG course, since Ryan — the course instructor from ACG, keeps insisting that it was the most important part of the course, did hands on on VGC on Qwiklabs.
As a final touch I went through the exam tips part at the end of each of the sections of the ACG course just a couple of hours before the exam.
The Exam
The exam consists of 65 questions for a score range of 100–1000 with 720 as passing score. By my calculations we need to have a sure shot 46 questions to pass the exam. There are two types of question, first being the straight radio button questions, in which 1 out of 4 possible options is correct and another being check box questions, where we should pick 2 out of 5 possible options.
I had fears about the multiple check box questions which would make or break any exam. To my relief I got only 8–9 multiple checkbox questions and remaining were straight radio button questions.
In the first iteration I marked answers only the questions that I knew the answer 100% sure. I had not answered around 24 questions after this. Then I used elimination strategy for the options for the questions that I was not sure about. I would read the question and strike out the options which I knew were not correct to square down on one option. In case I was not able to further drill down between two options, I would go by my gut instincts to pick an option. I flagged the answers which I was not sure of after this second iteration.
Once this was done I had flagged around 13 questions and by my probability calculations, if 90 % of the 52 questions that are un-flagged are actually correct and 40% of the flagged 13 questions were actually correct, I would get around 50 questions correctly. I had around 13 minutes left over when I clicked on the submit button and after a short survey, the result was displayed on the screen as pass!
I got the certificate by email the next day after 24 hours of the exam, after which I made a post on LinkedIn!

Up next, I started preparations for AWS ML Specialty the very next day after I passed this certification!
Do not hesitate to connect with me on LinkedIn for any advice related to this certifications.