There are not additional free sample questions, however there is a practice exam available from Pearson VUE that costs $55 USD.   More information here: https://www.sas.com/en_us/certification/resources/sas-practice-exams.html  ... View more

Yes. We have made the prerequisites interchangeable. The old base programmer will suffice as a prerequisite for the new Advanced Programming Professional, and the new Base Programming Specialist will suffice as a prerequisite for the old advanced programmer. ... View more

SD08 and I will continue that thread in private, but a general comment about exam design.   When creating multiple forms for an exam, the forms must be equated. The topical weightings are the same, the average difficulty of items is similar.   This goal of equating is to ensure that 2 people with the same skill/knowledge taking the 2 different forms will get the same score. Or if 1 person takes multiple forms and their skill/knowledge hasn't changed between the attempts, they would get the same score. We call this Reliability. See also test-retest repeatability.   ... View more

Hi mrsnow124,   Actually, the questions were not exactly the same. Some were and maybe that influenced your perception. I reviewed your exam results to be certain that your experience wasn't a fluke and somehow you saw the same form twice. (For the communities benefit, I was able to do so because the poster also reached out to us directly with more information about their identify).   Another alternative if you would like to see a completely different experience would be to take the new A00-232 exam and attempt to earn the new "SAS Certified Professional: Advanced Programming Using SAS 9.4" credential. This exam is performance-based: you will write SAS code during your exam. The original SAS Advanced Programmer exam will not be available after Sept 30. ... View more

Practice exams available from Pearson are built to the same specifications as the standard exam. They will have about the same number of questions, same weighting across objectives. In the case of the Platfrom Admin exam, there are ~70 questions on the practice exam. ... View more

Hi. I'm Mark and I work for SAS Certification. I've taken exams at Pearson, and your description is accurate, but I don't find it ridiculous, while I respect your perspective. These are pretty standard procedures for third party test proctoring to ensure the integrity of the exam attempt. Happy for others in the community to provide their perspective. Visit pearsonvue.com/SAS/op for a video of the Online Proctoring (at home) experience. It is true that for Online Proctoring, you cannot take breaks, you need to be in the view of the camera for the duration of the exam. You do get your exam results at the end of your exam. Thanks, Mark ... View more

Hi Scott,   I apologize for the problems you have encountered. The current lab-based exam use an RDP connection to support the labs and use a higher number UDP port number that is blocked by some firewalls. A small percentage Pearson VUE test centers run into this problem. the RDP requirement also prevents the labs from working on macs, which is why we don't support Online Proctoring on macs at this time. We are working with Pearson and our vendors to move to a HTML lab interface to the lab that we expect will simplify and improve the lab connection. This should occur within the next month.   I'll reach out to you privately to see if we can find a proven test site near your location.   Sincerely, Mark Stevens ... View more

Sorry for the delay @novinosrin - I've been messing with my email settings and clearly don't understand where my notifications are going. And apologies to @Paul830 for hijacking your thread.   Google - no. This would open up your exam session to places like SAS communities. I can see the posts now: SUBJECT: "Urgent!!! Please Help!!! Message Body: I'm in my exam and I need to know how to......."  Your exam needs to reflect your skill, not your friend Bob's.   But we do provide access to SAS documentation on the web in the exam. Not tech support, or training, but you can reach doc if you need to. It isn't the fastest access to doc, seems loading the doc pages stresses the virtual computers more than running the SAS programs do. It is there if you find yourself in a bind. We would say that successfully using SAS documentation is a valuable skill, so have at it. We even provide quick shortcuts to common material that a Base Programming Specialist would use regularly, such as Base Procedures, Functions, and Formats. Also, you have your choice of SAS UI, so if you want to use EG or Studio, you get the in-line syntax help too. Display Manager.....not so much.   And if you've answered 4,185 posts (and counting) here on the communities...I'm betting you have a lot of the Base syntax pretty well figured. But always review the exam content guide as part of your prep (What!? PROC TRANSPOSE is on here?....Oh jeez....). ... View more

I'll attempt to address the error, but first I think the bigger issue the the edition of the Prep Guide that you are using. CD's haven't been shipped as part of the prep guide since the second edition (circa 2009), and we are now on the fifth edition. There are significant changes to the exam since then. Also, this exam is nearing the end of it's life and will not be available after June. You may want to look into the new "SAS Certified Specialist: Base Programming Using SAS 9.4" credential. This new credential has it's own prep guide, which is a first edition guide.   Regarding the error you are getting, it sounds like you are using an environment (possibly SAS University Edition?) where the SASUSER library is not writable. There are ways around this by redefining the location of SASUSER with a new libname statement. ... View more