At last, the final day. Rather than cramming in new knowledge, today we firm up the strategy for how to take the exam. Knowing the exam structure precisely, building a time-allocation plan, and holding an exam-day checklist in hand can earn you a higher score at the very same skill level.
Today is not a day for putting in new knowledge but a day for getting ready to pull it out. Cramming the night before usually raises anxiety more than it raises your score.
65 questions / 90 minutes. The basic skeleton is a 60-minute first pass, a 25-minute second pass for review, and a 5-minute final check.
The passing line is 700 out of 1,000. You do not need to aim for a perfect score.
A blank answer is always zero. Keep the last 5 minutes reserved for filling in unanswered questions.
Physical condition is part of your ability too. Plan sleep, meals, and travel time ahead of the day before.
50 questions (15 are unscored evaluation questions)
Question types
Multiple choice (one correct option), multiple response (two or more options)
Score range
100–1,000
Passing line
700
Delivery
Test center or online proctored
Results
Usually a pass/fail notification within a few business days
Of the 65 questions, 15 are unscored evaluation questions. Since you can't tell which ones are evaluation questions, you must answer every question seriously. Passing is based on 700 out of a maximum 1,000.
On multiple-response questions you only earn credit if you match the required number exactly. Choosing just one or choosing three means the question cannot be saved. As soon as you read the question, check "how many was I asked to choose?" first.
Domain 3 (34%) and Domain 2 (30%) together make up 64% of the exam. You can assume that two out of every three questions on the paper come from these two domains.
Domain 4 is the smallest at 12%, but pricing models and cost tools are an area where the answers are clear-cut, so the return on investment is good. Dropping points here would be a waste.
Use the weights not to decide "what more to study" but to predict which domains will produce many questions in the exam room. Today is already too late to expand your studying.
⚠️ Pitfall: It is a mistake to think "Domain 4 is only 12%, so I can skip it." On a 65-question exam, nearly ten questions come from here, and the margin above the passing line is not that large. On top of that, pricing models (On-Demand, commitment, Spot) and cost tools (up-front estimates, after-the-fact analysis, budget alerts) are the kind of material where memorizing gets you the answer right away, so there is no reason to give it up.
65 questions / 90 minutes = about 1 minute 23 seconds per question
First pass: Go through all questions once within 60 minutes. Answer easy ones immediately; flag and skip the ones you're unsure about.
Second pass: Use the remaining 30 minutes to re-examine the flagged questions.
Final check: Confirm every question has an answer (blanks are marked wrong, so fill them in even if it's a guess).
Segment
Time
What to do
0–60 min
60 min
First pass on all questions + flagging
60–85 min
25 min
Re-examine flagged questions
85–90 min
5 min
Check for unanswered questions, fill in guesses
A blank is zero points, but a guessed answer has a chance of being right. If you eliminate two clearly wrong options from a four-option question, your odds of getting it right rise to 50%. You should always fill in an answer for every question.
There may come a moment in the exam room when you feel "I'm running out of time." At that point, move in the following order.
Count the time remaining and the number of questions remaining. Numbers are better than vague anxiety.
Forget the flagged questions for a moment and start with the questions you haven't touched yet. Unseen questions are more likely to be answered correctly than flagged ones.
For long passages, read only the final question sentence and decide. Even if you can't read all the conditions, you can still identify the category.
If you are still short on time, fill in answers for the remaining questions for now. If time is left after filling them in, go back.
Check that there is not a single unanswered question
Check that you matched the required number of answers on multiple-response questions
Leave as they are any answers you feel like changing without a reason
Even if time remains, do not forcibly flip answers; just submit
The point that people who have taken the exam most often regret is not "questions I got wrong because I didn't know" but "questions I got wrong because I changed the answer at the end." It is the case where you chose A on question 40, then in the last 3 minutes thought "it's probably C after all" and changed it, when A had been correct all along. There should be exactly one standard for changing an answer: change it only when you discover a condition you did not notice at first. "It just feels off" is not a reason.
Close the book and try answering the questions below first. If you get stuck on any item at this stage, it is enough to look at just that one line again and move on.
Domain 1 — Cloud Concepts
What are the six advantages of the cloud? → Upfront investment becomes variable cost, economies of scale, no need to guess capacity, speed and agility, lower data center operating costs, deploying worldwide in minutes
What is the difference between scalability and elasticity? → The ability to grow / the property of automatically growing and shrinking to match demand
What are IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS? → Only the basic infrastructure / up to the application runtime environment / up to complete software
What do you use to get high availability? → Spreading across multiple Availability Zones (AZs)
Domain 2 — Security and Compliance
What is the Shared Responsibility Model in one line? → AWS is responsible for the cloud itself, the customer for what is "in" the cloud
What is always the customer's responsibility no matter which service you use? → Data and access permissions
What is the safe way for EC2 to access S3? → An IAM role
What is the first step in account security? → Enable MFA on the root user + do not use it day to day
What are CloudTrail / Config / CloudWatch? → Who did it / are the rules being followed / are the metrics normal
What are Shield / WAF / GuardDuty? → DDoS protection / blocking web attacks / threat detection
Domain 3 — Cloud Technology and Services
What are S3 / EBS / EFS? → Object storage / a disk attached to a single instance / a file system shared by multiple instances
What are RDS / DynamoDB / Redshift? → Relational / serverless NoSQL / a data warehouse for analytics
What is the difference between EC2 and Lambda? → A server I manage / a function that runs only when there is an event
What are ELB and Auto Scaling? → Distributing traffic / increasing and decreasing the number of servers
What is CloudFront? → Caches at the edge to deliver quickly to users worldwide
Domain 4 — Billing, Pricing, and Support
When do you use On-Demand / commitment-based / Spot? → Unpredictable or short-term / steady use over a long period / when you can tolerate interruption
What are Pricing Calculator / Cost Explorer / Budgets? → Future estimates / past analysis / current alerts
What is the benefit of consolidated billing? → Combines the bills of multiple accounts into one and aggregates usage
What are the branches of Support plans? → Basic / Developer / Business / Enterprise
Cost tools: Pricing Calculator / Cost Explorer / Budgets
Support plan differences (Business = 24/7, Enterprise = TAM)
Scalability vs. elasticity, and high availability vs. fault tolerance vs. disaster recovery
The relationship between Organizations, consolidated billing, and SCPs
The distinction between GuardDuty (behavior) / Inspector (vulnerabilities) / Macie (sensitive data)
The distinction between Artifact (reports) / Config (configuration compliance) / Trusted Advisor (improvement recommendations)
Services classified as serverless (Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, etc.)
An intuitive sense of global services versus Regional services (IAM is global, etc.)
If three or four items are left unchecked, it is enough to look at only the one-line definition of each and move on. Today is not a day for opening a new chapter.
These are short rules to pull out when you stall between two options in the exam room.
Situation
3-second tie-breaker
AZ or Region?
If the passage has a "regional/geographic" expression, it's a Region; if not, it's an AZ
Auditing or monitoring?
If it's "who did it," it's auditing; if it's "how much is being used," it's monitoring
Estimate or analysis?
If you haven't used it yet, it's an estimate; if you already have, it's analysis
Can I choose Spot?
If there is an expression like "must not be interrupted," it's out
Serverless or not?
The moment you count instances yourself, it is not serverless
How do I grant permissions?
For people, users and groups; for services, a role
An option is tempting but I'm not sure
If it contains "always / unlimited / 100%," eliminate it
Short rules like these are called heuristics. They are not perfect discriminators, but when you're short on time they act as shortcuts that lower your chance of being wrong. In the exam room there is no time to re-derive the theory from scratch. If you read this table a few times today, in front of the actual questions "agonizing" turns into "discriminating."
I secured a quiet space where I will not be disturbed
I cleared my desk (put away in advance any items the exam rules do not allow)
I confirmed that my internet connection is stable
If on a laptop, I plugged in the power
Before starting, I completed the identity verification and environment check procedures per the instructions
⚠️ Pitfall: Opening new material in the hour or two right before the exam is mostly counterproductive. When a service name you've never seen comes up, the thought "I'm taking the exam and I don't even know this" chips away at your confidence, and that anxiety shakes your pace early in the exam. Right before the exam, you should only check what you already know. The loss from anxiety is greater than the expected gain from new knowledge.
It is better not to be shaken by one or two questions you don't know. Passing is 700, not a perfect score.
If you read expressions like "most suitable / most cost-effective / least operational overhead" to the end and catch the key keywords, you will do well.
The first answer that comes to mind is generally right. It is better not to change an answer without a reason.
Even if hard questions come up one after another, that is not a sign of failing. Of the 65 questions, 15 are unscored evaluation questions, and unusually unfamiliar ones may be mixed in among them.
The exam is not one that selects "perfect people" but one that checks "whether you have the fundamentals." You just answer within the scope you studied over six weeks.
Nervousness is not something to eliminate but something to handle. If your hands shake, even just reading one line of the passage slowly and silently will settle your breathing.