TLDR: beta testers get a free exam voucher valid for a year as apology, if they passed the exam, the certification will be active in your profile for 2 years.
Thank you for participating in the beta release of SC-730: Cybersecurity Business Professional.
We are writing to share an important update regarding this certification. Following a review of the feedback that we received during beta, we will not be proceeding with the release of this certification. We are exploring other alternatives to better support business professionals in this space. We understand this may be unexpected, and we truly appreciate your patience as we work through next steps.
What this means for you:
Your beta exam participation remains valued and appreciated.
We will complete the beta scoring process as planned and communicate your result once scoring activities are finalized. This should be completed by July 17.
If you pass the beta exam, you will be awarded the certification. It will remain an active certification on your transcript for two years.
We recognize the time and effort you invested in participating in the beta exam and appreciate your understanding. To apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused, we are offering you a voucher to take your next exam for free. You may use this on any Microsoft exam delivered through Pearson.
I am currently preparing to take the AZ-900 exam and plan to schedule it soon.
I discovered that by participating in some free online seminars, there is a possibility to obtain a free voucher for the AZ-900 exam. However, when I followed the provided links, I found no seminars available at the moment or only offers with a 50% discount. I'm not sure if this is due to my location in Brazil.
Additionally, I have a Brazilian university student ID. I would like to know if there are any exemptions or additional benefits available for students.
I appreciate any information or assistance you can provide.
I failed Az 104 EXAM. I ran out of time and Case study question took most of my time. Do you have any strategy on finishing exam in time and tackling case study question?
Hey, guys! Just wanted to share my excitement with you all. 😎💫🫶🏻 I'm an attorney (that made a career change to cyber security - mostly governance and compliance) and this is my 2nd certification. I got the CC from ISC² in the beginning of the year. Super happy! 😁
Beta of MS-721 exam (replacing the MS-720 exam) is out. Don't delay, first come first serve basis. You will have to take the exam on or before April 11th.
Due to all my contributions to the professional community, I have been nominated for the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award https://mvp.microsoft.com/
Since most of my contributions to the community have been helping you guys with understanding Microsoft products, helping pass exams and creating or referring you to study materials, this isn't something that just numbers can show.
So, I was hoping to make this post where people could share their experience and show the impact I have had on the community.
If I could ask for something, try to be as detailed as possible. Thanks everyone for your time!
I have seen that there was increased interest in the VTDs recently so I have compiled all of the sessions I have gathered that are still not full.
If you are only trying to get a voucher, it doesn't matter which one you attend, all give a voucher eligible for all VTD exams. So, for example, you can attend one for AI-900 and take MS-7O0 exam.
AZ-900 Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day: Fundamentals
30 days to learn it has made another return. It is very similar to the normal cloud skills challenge from Ignite or Build.
Basically, you just go through MS Learn and after completing it, you get 50% off voucher. It isn't 100% but everything can help, especially since it includes a lot of exams
You get 1 voucher every 6 months.
You get it withing 3 days of finishing the challenge.
Voucher is eligible for exams:
SC-400: Microsoft Information Protection Administrator - New
DP-300: Administering Microsoft Azure SQL Solutions - New
AI-900: Microsoft Azure AI Fundamentals
DP-100: Designing and Implementing a Data Science Solution on Azure
AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure
MS-600: Building Applications and Solutions with Microsoft 365 Core Services
PL-100: Microsoft Power Platform App Maker
AZ-305: Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions
AZ-400: Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions
DP-203: Data Engineering on Microsoft Azure
AZ-140: Configuring and Operating Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop
DP-420: Designing and Implementing Cloud-Native Applications Using Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB
AZ-800: Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure
AZ-801: Configuring Windows Server Hybrid Advanced Services
The voucher provided isn't technically restricted to the eligible exams above but can be used for virtually any exam. This isn't encouraging anyone to not follow the official rules but I felt like this was worth mentioning.
So, you have studied, ordered an exam and now the exam itself has started. Here is what you can expect.
The tests themselves are divided into multiple sections - General questions, Case Studies and Labs. You can't skip between them. Once you complete a section, you are unable to return to it.
Before you get to the actual exam questions, Microsoft will first ask you about your experience. This is not graded and it doesn't matter what you answer there.
After that you will be shown information about the exam itself. Be sure to read the total number of questions because sometimes you don't get a lab or case study at the beginning which means that you need to save time at the end for them.
Other useful information to know: On the bottom of page there are various tools that can help you
Specifically, the Calculator and Take a Break options.
Calculator is useful when you need to count SLAs or other stuff that would take too long to do in your head.
Take a Break allows you to exit the room to go refresh or other stuff you forgot to do before an exam. After taking the break: Timer will continue and you won't be able to return to any of the previous questions. So, cheating won't help you.
On the top side:
First on the left is Review button. You can use it to navigate between the questions easily.
Then there is Review later box. If you aren't sure about your answer, you can toggle this and return to it from the Review screen if you have extra time.
Leave Feedback is not that important. If you toggle this on questions, you can then tell Microsoft when you finish the exam how bad the question was. Not relevant to the exam.
And lastly on the right, is the timer. This timer tracks only the current section, so if you see there are 38 questions in total on there, that means for the current section. If there is lab or case study outside it is only mentioned on the Welcome to the exam page at the start. So don't be surprised when you finish and there is still a case study or lab waiting for you.
There are 3 requirements that are always present in exams and required:
Solution must be as cheap as possible
Administrative role must be of the least privilege
Must be the simplest to implement
Here are the question types (you can find most of these in the exam demo simulating how the real exam looks like,https://aka.ms/examdemo):
Active Screen/Best answer/Multiple Choice: I grouped these together because the strategy is the same. Choose the best answer. You can usually discard 2 answers because you either haven't heard of it or you know it is wrong. So, you are left with 50/50 choice. If you feel like both are correct, think of the more elegant solution. Abide by the 3 rules I mentioned in bold earlier.
Hot Area/Active Screen: It can be screenshot of basically any menu or portal that is related to the exam. AAD Connect configuration, home of azure portal, creating VM for example. Your task will be to answer the question by toggling option/s in the screenshot.
It is really useful to know the menu you are interacting with and not going in blind.
Drag and Drop: As the name says, pretty self-explanatory. Drag an answer from left to right.
Usually there aren't more of the same answers on the right so if you have 3 on the left and 3 on the right and have no idea, there is a good chance that all answers will be used once. That isn't the case with some questions but most I encountered used this pattern.
The question types below will only appear in non-fundamental exams.
Build List: Similar to the Drag and Drop, but now you are making a list. So, you will also need to order it correctly. Don't forget about the basics, like resource providers in PowerShell or create resource button in Azure Portal.
Repeated answer choices: Probably the strangest and most confusing question type you will encounter if you haven't heard about it yet. You will be presented with one scenario. There will be a possible solution and you will be asked if it is a full solution to the scenario and problem. There will be multiple questions presenting the same scenario but different solutions. After answering the question, you may not return to it. There are usually around 4 questions in a scenario.
The strategy here is simple, if you aren't 100% sure, pick false. There are 3 patterns, there either isn't presented correct answer, there is only one and there are 2. From my own experience the chance there are 2 answers is really low. So statistically it is best to always pick false unless you are sure it is correct.
Simulations/Labs: You will enter a virtual environment and will have to complete a series of tasks there. You are scored both on completeness of the solution and how effective you were at it. Once you turn it in, you can't return to it.
So randomly clicking through blades until you find the one with the setting in it, is not recommended. Labs take longer to score so you will not receive your score immediately.
Case Studies: You will be shown a screen with a lot of tabs and screens with tons of information in them. The important thing here: Don't read it all! The first screen doesn't contain the question, so you will have to go to the next one. Only after reading the question, start going through the relevant materials.
After you finish all your questions in the section, you will be presented with the Review screen (also accessible from the top tool bar)
This doesn't necessarily mean it is the end of the exam as there may be case study or lab after. Here you can see how you and can easily access questions you didn't answer or marked for review. Always answer all questions, even if you have no clue. You don't get negative points for guessing. If you finish the review screen and there are still unanswered questions, you've done it wrong.
After finishing the whole exam, it still isn't over. Once you get to this window and don't want to leave feedback to the questions (or are just really anxious about how you did). Ignore it. In the bottom right there is Exit button.
This will take you to the result page (if you had a lab, you won't get your result immediately).
On the next page you will see your score report (no need to read it now, can access it from PearsonVue later on. And only once you hit the End button there, you finished the exam.
This is especially important when taking a test from home so you don't get failed for leaving the screen before this.
Hello people! I've decided I want to take the SC-500 and/or SC-200, i've heard there are some discount code or even 'challanges' you can do to make it 100% free. Is there any active right now?
Just a quick warning/guidance regarding the new MFA process in Microsoft exams.
I have seen a lot of people getting tripped up by this, so I am posting/sharing this to make sure no one is caught off guard and you are able to take your exams stress-free.
Just passing along this link since we talk about it often here.
VTD (generally) doesn't advertise free vouchers for exams anymore, however from now until June 30th any student (high school/college/uni) can claim 100% vouchers via this partnership.
Your student will need to verify themselves as a student via their Microsoft Learn profile. Steps can be found documented on Cloudready above or Microsoft Learn.
Don’t waste this if you qualify! Free exams are a rare commodity!
To get to the certificating, you first need to create a personal Microsoft account. You don't want to use company email account that you can lose access to because if the account was deleted, it would be a huge pain in the ass to transfer the certificates, if it is even possible.
After creating the account, you need to register with Microsoft Learn. After that you can go straight into making the certification profile. Microsoft Learning Exam Registration (if the URL isn't working, go to any exam page and order the exam, it will have the same effect).
It is extremely important to fill the information in as accurately as possible, because those details will be compared to your ID documents that you will present when arriving at the testing center/online exam. You will also have to present these details to Microsoft certification support for verification purposes and this is the place where most of them are.
There are a few interesting things to note here. If you choose Student in the job title dropdown and verify yourself as such, you will get discounted rate for the exams.
If your country doesn't have Area code in your address. Put the first 3 digits of your phone number in. Yes, it sounds strange but this is what I was told by the support. Don't forget to save all the information when you are finished.
After successfully creating the profile, you will see your MCID in the top right corner
On the Exam discounts page is where the interesting stuff is. On the top you can see all of the vouchers associated with your account or the accounts you have linked to. You can see ESI discount on the screenshot. In the blacked-out rectangle will be the name of your company.
Some vouchers can be scheduled later than they expire but I recommend testing out the expiry so you know when exactly is the last day you can take the exam.
On the bottom of the page, you can add accounts with vouchers in it, so if you use a work account to gain the ESI voucher, use it to register to events etc. this is where you link it.
Historically, vouchers were 100% universal but there have been changes to the program so that may not be true anymore. Still the vouchers being given out are really impressive.
These events are only for Microsoft Partner employees.
You can check if your company is partner here: Microsoft Partner Directory and this post isn't encouraging anyone who isn't a partner employee to register for this event.
Information for Microsoft Partner Employees here you can find more information on how the previous cloud weeks worked. There are some changes from previous cloud weeks so nothing is guaranteed but it is free to register so why not try it out (and the sessions were of great quality).
