Schedule it right now!

In the previous section, I demonstrated that even after hours of study, you can make mistakes and get the wrong answer.

This shouldn’t mean that you should procrastinate and forestall signing up to your exam forever: believe me, you can study as much as you can, but there will always be a question that you won’t fully understand (it may happen if English isn’t your mother tongue) or simply that won’t find a fit with your knowledge base.

If you schedule the exam, you’ll find yourself committed to that date and efficiently use the remaining time to study and prepare for a successful result.

Preparing for the exam

Whether you’ll be doing the exam online or onsite, no books, notes, smartphones, smart watches are allowed: it’s you and the screen (and the people behind the webcam or the exam room who are checking that you are not cheating).

I’ve never attended an exam at a proctored site for the following reasons:

• None of the cities on the beautiful island where I live have a certified exam site.
• To do the online proctored exam, you just need a laptop, a webcam, a reliable internet connection, and a quiet place.

If you plan an online exam, remember the following:

• Don’t wear watches.
• Put your smartphone in silent or plane mode.
• Don’t use multiple screens.
• Don’t drink/eat during the exam.
• Don’t wear sunglasses, and if you (like me) have to wear normal glasses, they’ll ask you to show the glasses to the webcam (to prove they are not smart glasses).
• Don’t talk or read the questions out loud or point out to the screen with your fingers (I did once and was asked to stop).

Have a read at the following Trailhead article to get more info about both types of exams at https://trailhead.salesforce.com/help?article=Scheduling-an-Exam.

Question format

If you have already passed any other certification, the question formats should already be clear: a single or multiple-choice format.

Whether there are 1, 2, or 3 right answers (I have never seen more than 3 right answers), there is always a completely wrong answer (if not more than one), and the other ones are quite similar. I’m not saying you have to roll the dice to get the right one, but choosing between a narrow set of questions is definitely a plus.

And if you are not that sure about your answers, flag the Mark this item for later review checkbox so you can skip to the next question later at the end of the exam: later on you, can even find a related question that can help you answer (or simply remember) a previous question, so don’t be rushed: take a breath and use all the allotted time you have. The Advanced Administrator certification test must be completed in 105 minutes (as of Winter ’20); that is a little less than 2 minutes per question (enough time, if you have studied).

The final step

Are you ready to ace this? Schedule your exam, take a deep breath, and start your Advanced Administrator certification exam: you have studied a lot, you have deepened your knowledge, and can face another certification with enough confidence.

In the next and final chapter, you’ll have a chance to prove your skills with two mock exams: start your stopwatch and prove you are an advanced, awesome admin!

Good luck!

Summary

In this chapter, we traced the path to the exam day by linking further resources to improve your knowledge (outside of this book) and looking at how scores are calculated.

Finally, we described how failing an exam could be a great source of learning (although I bet you won’t fail!) and that you should schedule the exam as soon as you have completed study all of the topics because procrastination leads to no exam at all!

Before closing this long journey, you’ll be presented with two mock exams to test your skills for the last time!