Tips and Tricks for Passing Your Exam
This whole book is meant to be a structured trail to give you all the content you need to increase your chances of passing the Salesforce Advanced Administrator test (and to improve your skills, of course).
Throughout the chapters so far, I’ve tried to give you hints and pointers, as well as links to online official documentation and useful blogs for further reading and digging into the topics. If you plan to pass the Advanced Administrator certification test, then this means that you have already passed the Administrator certification test, so the exam day should not be a surprise for you, but I’m sure you’ll find the tips and tricks covered in this chapter useful in helping you to be confident on exam day.
In this chapter, we’ll learn the following:
- How to deepen your knowledge and find the right resources
- How to calculate question scores
- How to face your exam and optimize your final score
- What to expect on the exam day
Keep studying
We have covered all the required topics, providing diverse examples and use cases to increase the chances of this book helping you achieve the ultimate purpose of scoring well in the certification. However, it is important to keep studying these subjects to ensure we stay on top of things.
Topics and scores
The topics that the chapters and sections have covered haven’t been randomly chosen, as the Salesforce Advanced Administrator certification guide clearly states what is covered in the exam and what percentage of questions will cover that topic (as of Winter ’20):
- Security and Access: 20%
- Extending Custom Objects and Applications: 8%
- Auditing and Monitoring: 6%
- Sales Cloud Applications: 10%
- Service Cloud Applications: 10%
- Data Management: 10%
- Content Management: 3%
- Change Management: 10%
- Analytics, Reports, and Dashboards: 10%
- Process Automation: 13%
We have probably covered more than what’s strictly necessary for the exam, but more is better when dealing with knowledge.
Given that each exam session contains 60 questions (optional 5 more questions may be added by Salesforce to the exam for internal checks, but they are not scored; unfortunately, you don’t know which questions those are), you get the following average number of questions per topic:
- Security and Access: 12
- Extending Custom Objects and Applications: 4-5
- Auditing and Monitoring: 3-4
- Sales Cloud Applications: 6
- Service Cloud Applications: 6
- Data Management: 6
- Content Management: 1-2
- Change Management: 6
- Analytics, Reports, and Dashboards: 6
- Process Automation: 7-8
The pass score is 65%. Doing the math, you can tell that you need to answer at least 39 questions correctly.
This doesn’t seem too much, but each question generally has a multiple-choice format, which means that each question can have more than one right answer, increasing the difficulty level.