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Passed 70-412, finished MCSA
srocky26
Member Posts: 39 ■■□□□□□□□□
Just finished taking the exam a little bit ago and scraped by with a 718, thus earning me the MCSA. As others have stated, this exam is sneaky hard.
I studied pretty hard for 5.5 weeks and felt confident in taking the exam, but went on vacation and killed some brain cells. I had already planned on taking the exam this week, so I forced myself to brush up on the big topics this week before the exam (DAC, ADCS, network services, and clustering) . I didn't hit the right spots.
I skipped AD RMS, ADFS, and azure backups. I figured there wasn't really much detail in the resources I used to study, so what I knew should be good enough. Right out of the gate I got hit with some pretty tough questions and ended up marking the first 7 for review. Then I hit a pretty good hot streak for 25 questions before I hit a few more road blocks. At the end I had 11 questions marked for review that really took some time.
The ADFS questions seemed fair, however the knowledge just wasn't fresh, I should've reviewed it before the exam. The Azure backup questions were much more in depth than I expected. I suggest actually creating an account and working with Azure online backups with multiple servers and vaults to really get a feel for the service.
My study materials were:
CBT Nuggets
Pluralsight
Microsoft Press Exam Ref 70-412: Configuring Advanced Server 2012 R2 Services
MOAC Configuring Advanced Server 2012 R2 Services
Mastering Windows Server 2012 R2
Technet Labs
Home lab
Work lab
I'm not sure what I'm going to go after next. Microsoft-wise I think I'd like to knock out the MCSE, but I'm just not feeling two more exams right now. I also considered upgrading to 2016, but I think I'm going to wait a bit on that.
I studied pretty hard for 5.5 weeks and felt confident in taking the exam, but went on vacation and killed some brain cells. I had already planned on taking the exam this week, so I forced myself to brush up on the big topics this week before the exam (DAC, ADCS, network services, and clustering) . I didn't hit the right spots.
I skipped AD RMS, ADFS, and azure backups. I figured there wasn't really much detail in the resources I used to study, so what I knew should be good enough. Right out of the gate I got hit with some pretty tough questions and ended up marking the first 7 for review. Then I hit a pretty good hot streak for 25 questions before I hit a few more road blocks. At the end I had 11 questions marked for review that really took some time.
The ADFS questions seemed fair, however the knowledge just wasn't fresh, I should've reviewed it before the exam. The Azure backup questions were much more in depth than I expected. I suggest actually creating an account and working with Azure online backups with multiple servers and vaults to really get a feel for the service.
My study materials were:
CBT Nuggets
Pluralsight
Microsoft Press Exam Ref 70-412: Configuring Advanced Server 2012 R2 Services
MOAC Configuring Advanced Server 2012 R2 Services
Mastering Windows Server 2012 R2
Technet Labs
Home lab
Work lab
I'm not sure what I'm going to go after next. Microsoft-wise I think I'd like to knock out the MCSE, but I'm just not feeling two more exams right now. I also considered upgrading to 2016, but I think I'm going to wait a bit on that.
