Sat VCAP5-DCA yesterday

[virtualinstall]

Hi all,

Sat the VCAP5-DCA exam yesterday, I really liked the exam format it's so much better than multiple choice.  The latency only started to frustate me in the last hour when I was really starting to worry about time, what was worse than the latency though was the screen redraw on the RDP sessions.  Most of the time I was clicking on tabs in the vSphere Client from memory as I couldn't see them.  I did have all the configuration from one question completely dissapear which was odd, as I'd saved and changed it a few times during the question, but then later on when I needed to add to that config it was completely gone!  As said many times before, after all the studying, time in the exam is the biggest challenge.  It did feel like I was at work at some points lol.  Overall I quite enjoyed it, I didn't complete all the questions but hopefully enough for a pass, it was strangely satisfying working through the tasks.

Time will tell, the long wait for the results now :smileyplain:

[platonik88]

Hi virtualinstall

I sat my VCAP5-DCA on Monday and my experience was so similar to yours. I really liked the exam format - practical tasks rather than multiple choice to test my actual abilities to use the product rather than just testing the knowledge.

I didn't have time to complete all the questions, got to 18-19 out of 26. I really hope I did enough to pass, although I reckon I could have got a much higher score if I had rushed through the questions rather than being extra precise and pondering over each task.

My RDP sessions started lagging around 1 hour to the end of the exam, which I found very frustrating. Apart from the long time to switch among the different windows, my powerCLI was taking a long time to output text.

Also, at some point I realised that the configuration required to complete one of the tasks had completely gone - which I wouldn't expect to happen in a real vSphere environment. Whatever happened, I hope it doesn't affect my final score - as it affected my remaining time.

FIngers crossed, hope we both passed!

[wodge]

Hi platonik / virtualinstall,

I sat my VCAP-DCA Yesterday, and can say that I had exactly the same experience. I agree that the exam format is excellent, and actually tests your real-world ability.

However, I also didn't have time to complete the questions, and left about 6 unanswered. Half way through the questions, when "coming up for air" I realized that I only had about an hour left to do the remaining 13! I would re-iterate the point that virtualinstall made that their isn't enough time to check / validate your configurations for the first questions - but you need to make sure these are done correctly as they are dependencies for the rest of the exam. I think it would be fair to have core questions in the exam, and then have a group of optional questions (say 10), of which you have to attempt a subset (say 😎 - just a suggestion. The point being that you are demonstrating your knowledge to understand the requirement / issue, and ability to diagnose faults / implement a solution. It seems to me that getting the answers right is more important than being able to get through them all, which becomes the over-riding concern when the timescale is so pressurized.

Fingers crossed here, too. Hope you've both passed, would be great if you could let us know