Base Certification Exam:Fail

[nageljen11]

Hello all, I just took my base exam and unfortunately failed, I had completed the essential 1 course and did the practice test multiple times to make sure I understood the code and the multiple choice. I also bought the certification prep guide book and was able to do the coding exercises and answer the multiple choice problems with ease. The certification was not what I was expecting and now I am unsure where to find the additional info I feel like I will need to pass a second attempt... Some coding exercises on the exam I hadn't seen in either of the study materials that I had used...what else can I use for a resource. I know there is the programming essentials2 but I simply cannot afford it...input would be appreciated...thank you.

[ballardw]

How many of the questions that are posed on this forum can you answer?

There are literally thousands of questions on this forum and are a good resource for more practice, with the advantage for many of them to have one or more solutions provided.

[nageljen11]

where exactly do I find these problems and solutions....when I search I get a lot of different posts and forums...

[ChrisNZ]

Each post is a question that you can use for practice. 

Stick to the Programming community for your purpose. Read the questions and understand the answers. This will not doubt exercise your brain.:)

[Kurt_Bremser]

Look back at the exam questions that had you stumble.

Then do a search here for the keywords, or do a similar search in google where you add "communities.sas.com". I have had the experience that the external google search often works better than the internal search engines provided by the websites. Or at least gives you a different result, broadening your view.

Once you have found a solution, play around with it until you understand how it works. Change elements to see how that changes the outcome.

[nageljen11]

Awesome, thank you for your help. I will be using the communities page much more in preparation for the base exam again. Also, I know we cannot directly ask specific questions that were on the exam, but how do I know what I got wrong/if I wasn't sure how to do a coding problem? I don't think we can look at the results of the actual exam can we?? 

[Kurt_Bremser]

Don't you get a result that tells you which answers were incorrect?

[Mark2010]

I appreciate all of the advice here. I agree that the coding questions on this forum are an excellent resource.

To answer first @Kurt_Bremser 's question: No, we do not provide question specific feedback on the exam. This is normal practice for all IT certification programs (and also professional licensing and admissions testing in general). To help candidates gauge their performance, we provide section scores that provide the percentage correct for each of the 4 sections of the exam listed on our Exam Content Guide. 

In addition to reading the community forums, here are some additional ideas/resources:

1) The Learning Subscription is free for 30 days. If you haven't used it already, you could use this to take the Programming 2 course.

2) Check out the 'Additional Resources' section of our prep content which includes a community article (which in turn includes videos) and a great webinar.

3) My video on 4 exam prep tips

3) For future readers of this post, We recommend not using the practice exam as study material. It should be used after you feel that your preparation is complete to gauge your readiness for the exam.

4) If you find that you are more comfortable with standard questions rather than a performance-based exam experience, then you may want to consider our Programming Associate credential.