I’ve been messing around with various prep materials for various Microsoft exams for a while now. I go back and forth, but I never seem to get far enough to actually take a test. The ground shifts under me, and I have to switch my focus to something else.
I’d been working towards taking the AZ-204 exam, starting in mid-2024, but I kept getting sidetracked. Well, I got serious about it again recently. But then I realized that there’s some overlap between AZ-204 and AZ-900, and I could probably prep for the AZ-900 in just a few days. I already know a lot of the material on AZ-900, so there wasn’t much extra stuff to learn.
So I spent some time last week studying, then got enough done over the weekend that I felt I could take the exam today. And with the online exams, you can generally get a same-day appointment. So I did that, and passed the exam today!
The process for the online, at-home, exam is pretty much the same as it was in 2023, when I passed the PL-900 exam. The one wrinkle I had this time was that I couldn’t get through the pre-exam system check. Long story short: I had to go into “Windows Features” on my laptop and disable anything related to Hyper-V. They don’t want you taking the exam on a VM, which I can kinda understand, but they also make it impossible to take the exam on a laptop that’s configured as a VM host, which is kinda silly. I also had an issue where the proctor made me wander around my table with my laptop, showing her my entire kitchen table via the webcam, to make sure the table surface was actually clear. And she had me take off my watch. So the prep was a bit of a pain, and took longer than the actual test. I don’t remember the proctor bothering me at all last time.
I paid for the exam myself, using a 50% discount that I can get through ESI (Enterprise Skills Initiative), so it was only $50. I might get reimbursed for it, or I might not. I decided to take this exam without running it by my boss first. I was afraid he might throw some obstacles in my way, and I just wanted to “strike while the iron was hot,” so to speak.
I’ve also rediscovered today that my “test anxiety” problem is still a thing. I’ve always had it. It peaked in high school, where I went through a phase where I would get physically sick when dealing with high-pressure tests (like finals or mid-terms). At some point, I realized what was happening, and got it under control. (There was really no guidance for mental health stuff for teenagers back then, so I’m not sure how I did it. I just figured it out on my own.) Anyway, even taking a dumb little Microsoft cert exam still makes me break out in a sweat, apparently.
I’m probably going to try for the AZ-204 later this year, if I can find the time to finish the prep.