So myself and Kim did this exam the other day.
Kim hasn’t done any DCA style exam before, and he had a similar experience to me on my first go. It kind of hits you like a train and its a lot to take in initially. The beta signup period didn’t give anyone much time to actually prep for it properly.
Having done the 5.5 DCA, I remember looking at some of the questions and wondering what they were wanting……exactly. I did what I thought was correct, you don’t have time to second guess yourself, you just get on with it and do what you can.
The best explanation for the DCA/Deployment exam is:
Imagine you are a contractor and you have been hired to set stuff up/fix problems and you have been giving the exam duration to do as much as you can.
I have yet to meet someone who has answered every question fully in the exam, everyone seems to leave a few questions totally blank, either because they don’t know the answer, or they are short on time and want to sort out the bits they know.
The whole new HOL interface was great, I only suffered a bit of lag towards the end, and it didn’t make any difference. There was a slight lag overall, but that’s the same with the HOLs in general.
Since I went through the grinder with the 5.5 DCA, when this started I was like ok……and just worked my way through all the questions, I wrote down all the question numbers and any I thought were difficult I made a note of what they were asking so I could come back to them later…..if I had time.
The questions do kind of build on each other, so you can skip back and forth a bit, but not too much. I had to get the train down to London for this beta exam, it was a long long day.
Overall it was a much better experience than VCAP5-DCA. All the training steps that were for v5.5 hold true for 6.
I used the HOLs to study for the exam, made sure I knew the interface well, and used them to make sure I had a lot of the v6 stuff down well.
Our good friend Ariel @arielsanchezmor has already done a solid post on how he tackled the exam, and I did it in pretty much the same way, except I did all the HOLs listed.
https://sites.google.com/site/arielsanchezmora/home/study-guides/vcap6-dcv-deploy-beta
Remember you can boot up any HOL and trash it trying out different things…best thing ever!!
Myself and Kim are still waiting for our VCAP6-Design results, and it has been months. I hope we get those and the Deploy results sometime soon…..I want my VCIX-DCV haha.
Leave a Reply