Back in November last year, I did the Microsoft Learn Cloud Skills Challenge 2022. It was a challenge where you can get a free exam voucher provided you complete 1 chosen Cloud Challenge by November 9.

Recently I finally secured the free exam and a free certificate. Here's how I did it.

Study Plan

After doing the AI Challenge, I put the exam on hold till mid January. By then I needed a refresher on the course materials. I decided on the AI exam as I wanted to improve my ML skills. It is also one of the few exams offered which could directly lead to a certificate

I went with a Udemy course, watching the course videos. It familiarised myself with the platform. I would say it ended up not helping much else though. In fact, it didn't cover some topics.

One common thing I also saw online is that many of the courses online may also not be accurate or up to date, as Microsoft has depreciated many functions and changed some features. In the end, I realised the best resource is still Microsoft's own online learning platform as it covers all the topics. I reread it through briefly before the exam and it helped me (the differential privacy section as well as explanations sections helped)

However, I was also recommended to buy an eBook with past exam questions. Its called Microsoft-Certified-Scientist-Associate-DP-100. This is something I would highly recommend. The questions delve into specific and technical details. Keep in mind these technical details as even if the questions aren't exactly the same, the concepts and details you learn from the boom

If I were to study for it again, I would

1. Focus on the materials on the Microsoft Learn Platform
2. Read the book
3. Familiarise yourself with the ML Workspace (not necessary but still good to do)

Exam

I did my exam at home through the Pearson Vue online system. There were 50 MCQ questions. About 5 questions are part of a case study that you cannot go back to review after answering.

You cannot bring in physical paper. You also cannot go to the toilet once the exam started, so make sure to do so

Other than that, if you read from the book, most of the questions are actually very similar/ the exact same.

Quite a few questions were on code (what functions do what), a few on ML concepts (epsilon in differential privacy). There weren't too much questions involving the platform's UI.

They may test external libraries such as mlflow for experiments, not just those limited to their own azureml library

Results

Immediately after I ended the exam, they gave me my results. I passed the exam!

Overall my thoughts on the exam is that it is a relatively good exam for learning cloud ML concepts. I may use Azure's ML platform in the future with this certificate