I finally passed the exam yesterday!!
Here's what I think finally helped me pass:
- I re-took the practical part of the official practice exam a dozen times. While the Scenarios in the Prep guide were good, I found that the official practice exam questions were more similar to the exam questions in difficulty and wording. I wish there were more than one practice exam because the questions and answer descriptions were really helpful. Anyway, I made sure that I could write the code to each program without hesitation so that I didn't have to waste time looking at the online documentation during the exam.
- I read the three articles Mark2010 mentions at the bottom of his Tips and Strategies post:
SQL: Merges and Joins
Macro: Macro Quoting Functions
Advanced Topics:Hash Objects
These articles helped me understand those topics at a greater depth so that I wasn't relying purely on memorization of code.
- I did subscribe to SAS Advanced Programming Professional Subscription. It is expensive (to me) but I felt like it was worthwhile. I find the instructors to be excellent, and the presentation of the topics is incredibly clear. It takes a while to go through all the videos but it was helpful to be able to watch the video instruction on the topics I was still a bit fuzzy on. For example, hash objects lesson did a better and more thorough job of explaining that topic than everything I had already read on it.
- I scoured the web for practice questions but I didn't come up with a lot that wasn't trying to sell me a course or that had reliably correct answers. So instead I read through some of the posts here regarding the different exam topics, since I was much more confident that the answers given here were backed up by real people (and others calling out any mistakes they saw).
Good luck to you! Don't give up. I think I would've been pretty devastated if I had failed this time since I studied so hard! If you can pass it on the second try, you'll have done better than me!
-Theresa
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