
As someone who has difficulty studying, I passed the AZ-900
I'll try to keep this brief. Long story short, I have a hard time studying, not going to speculate, here's what I went through and I hope it helps others who are similar, I scored a 794. All in all, took me a month (see below if you want the full story, not necessary though)
- First: I went through two separate playlists, Tech Pub's entire exam prep course, and John Savill's playlist and wrote down notes while watching both of their videos.
- Second, I went through the practice exams on Tutorialsdojo (comb over the ENTIRE thing, I found out 5 days prior to taking my test that the 3 exam topic things all covered different questions)
- Third, I made flashcards off of questions I got regularly incorrect on TD.
- Fourth, I used Gemini but ONLY to thoroughly double check my info.
TD's wording of the questions and material was shockingly similar to the exam for a good bit of it, but it obviously wasn't 1 to 1. I scored an average of about 80% before I scheduled my test (and in a panic went through the other exam things as many times as I could and luckily still got about a 75-85%). It's worth going through and getting.
However, my suggestion on top of that is to take down the questions you encounter, plus the answers, and put them in something, a spreadsheet, a word editor, and track how often you encounter that question (the more thorough you are with tracking, the better). It started to get to a point with me where I was remembering the answer but not WHY, which I knew was going to trip me up.
My notes from the videos was whatever they said, including a lot of overlapping and rewriting info I already took down. I suspect there's some stuff that's out of date, so seeing if there's anything official from Microsoft would be helpful, I already know a few videos from Savill's playlist are no longer covered in the AZ-900 which some of the comments pointed out (its around video #20), while Tech Pub's prep course is a good bit more up to date. Writing it down several times helped drill a lot of that info into me.
When it comes to studying, one thing I should've embraced more were flashcards - I only really did it near the end so I don't have a lot of them. However drilling the information as much as I did helped to solidify the concepts I was super weak to, like a week ago I wouldn't have remembered anything about defense in depth or anything.
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This is where I kinda go over about HOW I studied, the above is everything I did, but my biggest issue is that I only ever put so much time a day into each attempt at studying - I maybe got onto a roll and did it for two hours a day at most but on average it was 30 minutes on the low, 60 on the high. Maybe it was actually way more than that, I couldn't really keep a track because I did so mainly at work (weird af hours, getting interrupted while studying, replaying sections, it all added up to a mess), but it certainly didn't feel like I made a lot of progress. I'm easy to distract, its hard for me to get back on track, overall it was a crappy experience and it took me roughly a month to get to this point.
I wish I could provide more help but really all I can do is say that your best bet is to try to block out periods of time where you're focusing entirely on studying, try to do at least 2 hours a day and if nothing else block them out in chunks, like four half hour sessions, or six sessions of 20 minutes, like JUST enough to get through a video or two and write down your notes. In between each session spend like 10-20 minutes away, just enough to sort of readjust your focus, constantly setting alarms and times for everything - if you're on a roll with studying and you just knocked out like 40 minutes worth of video while also writing notes down and you can keep going, hammer on and stop when you start to drift around. For certain things writing them down on a flash card can help with recalling the information much sooner, notes are great when you're sitting in bed and you're reading up on what you went over while the cards can actively test your ability. If you do have difficulty studying things, my honest recommendation is to talk with a doctor. It could be ADHD, it could be something completely different, I spoke with my doc a few months ago and apparently thyroid problems can cause focusing issues along with memory problems, it's not always going to be one single thing.
In the mean time, don't beat yourself up over it. If you can find videos on youtube that can help address your focusing problem by providing better managing techniques, just remember that step one is always starting the thing to begin with. I pretty much stated all this mainly to at least help show that even if you can't focus on studying worth a darn, it IS possible. I've had zero cloud experience and my last dealings with tech exams was about 2.5 years ago getting a comptia cert and not being able to actually apply it, so this is something you can just jump into. I know this is a giant wall of text but I also don't know how to talk to people with attention problems, but if nothing else hopefully someone goes 'ok, if this guy can do it then so can I, let's learn from their mistakes'.