I failed my first AWS exam by 3 points. Here's what I changed.

The score came up on the screen. 697. The line was at 720. I sat there in the testing center booth in Lyon, staring at it, and the proctor was already knocking on the door. Three points.

Honestly, I wasn't even surprised. Disappointed, yes. Surprised, no.

I'd done what most people do. Read the book front to back. Watched a 14-hour video course on 1.5x speed. Took notes. Felt ready. There's a problem nobody warns you about, though. Feeling ready and being ready are two completely different things. I only realized that after.

The fix wasn't more studying. It was different studying.

I started doing practice exams cold. Not "study a chapter, do 10 questions on that chapter." That's testing recall, not retrieval under pressure. I mean a full 65-question mock, timed, no breaks, on a Saturday morning when I didn't feel like it. The first one was brutal. I scored 58%. But every wrong answer became a topic to revisit, and the topics that kept coming back were the ones I actually didn't know, not the ones I thought I didn't know.

Here's the weird part. I had been overstudying VPC details. Subnets, NACLs, route tables. I knew them cold. The questions I was getting wrong were on cost optimization and which database service fits which workload. Stuff I had skimmed because I "got it."

Mock exams expose what you're avoiding.

I retook the exam on May 4th, 2024. Same testing center. Same little booth. 854. I literally laughed out loud, which the proctor did not love.

A few things I'd tell anyone in the same spot:

• Don't trust your gut on what you know. The gut is a liar.
• Two full mocks per week, minimum, for the last three weeks.
• Read the question stem twice. Once normally, once looking for the trick word.
• "MOST cost-effective" and "MOST operationally efficient" are two different exams.

The gap between 697 and 854 wasn't 157 points of new knowledge. It was a different way of preparing. That's it.