Amazon AWS Certified Machine Learning Specialty – Wrapping Up

1. Section Intro: Wrapping Up

I’m happy to say you’ve gotten through all the hard stuff. All that’s left is to give you some more specific guidance on what to expect on the actual certification exam and some other resources that you might want to study up on before you take it.

As we said at the beginning of this course, you just can’t prepare enough for this exam. And I want you to know about all of the preparation resources that are available to you. Let’s explore the final preparation steps you should take prior to sitting for the actual exam.

2. More Preparation Resources

So, again, you just can’t prepare enough for this exam. This course should cover pretty much everything you need to know, but if you want to go even further, you can prepare even more. And here’s some more useful resources for you. First of all, take any practice exams you can find. And not just ours, there are other ones out there too, so I don’t want to endorse any specific one. I haven’t actually taken any of the other ones myself. I managed to pass the exam without taking a full length practice exam ahead of time. But they’re out there, so it’s a good use of your time to see if you have the stamina to take the real thing and get a good idea of the sorts of questions you might encounter. So practice makes perfect, and that goes for practice exams as well. And probably the best one you can take, well, apart from ours, of course, would be the one offered by Amazon itself.

So you can actually sign up for a 1 hour practice exam through the same process whereby you would sign up for the real exam, where you go to a testing center. So just search for the Certified machine Learning specialty practice exam on AWS, and you can get that from either of their testing provider vendors, just like you can for the real thing. It costs $40, I think it is, and what you get back is just the ability to take that exam at home on your own PC, as opposed to going to a testing center. But otherwise it’s just like the real thing, it’s just shorter. And I think you’ll find that that’s a really good indicator of your readiness for the real exam. I actually scored better on the real exam than on their practice exam. So if you can pass the practice exam, there’s a good chance you can pass the real thing too. So highly recommend doing that. It’s a modest investment compared to the cost of the exam itself. So if you do want to take an additional practice exam, I do recommend Amazon’s. It’s only an hour and it’s a great indicator of your readiness.

If you want to review some of the stuff in this course, specifically around Sage Maker, check out the Sage Maker Developer Guide. It’s online and you’ll find a lot of the same information in here, but it’s a good way to review it in text form. It should all be familiar since you sat through this course already. But it’s a great way to do sort of a last minute review the day before your exam maybe, and go through all the different built in models and algorithms that are available, how they work, what they do, some of the operational and security considerations surrounding Sage Maker. These are all very important for the exam, and this is where all that information lives. Amazon also makes an exam guide available for free. If you head over to their page for the exam that you can download it from there and it goes through the structure of the exam, what to expect, the breakdown of questions, and also some of their own recommendations for exam preparation, which of course include very expensive live instructor led training courses. Well, it’s up to you if you want to do that, but I think the stuff online is more than enough and probably even better, but I haven’t actually sat through one of those myself, so I can’t really say. They also have some links here for other materials to review. Can’t hurt. I mean, you should be familiar with these concepts from going through this course, but it’s definitely not a bad idea to review containerized machine learning. For example, how splitting your data for training and testing works if you’re new to that.

This should be stuff that you’re pretty much familiar with already, though, from going through this course. And some of it goes into a little bit more tangential stuff that’s not really on the exam, like those reinvent talks. Not sure you need that much depth on it, but can’t hurt to watch it, right? Also, they have a list of ten sample questions available from that same page that the exam guide is on. You can download those as well, and I definitely recommend doing that. It’s free. Why wouldn’t you do that, right? And these are actual questions coming from Amazon itself. Now, the first time that I thought about taking this exam myself, the first thing I did was look at these sample questions because I figured, hey, I know a lot about machine learning, I know a little bit about Sage Maker. I should be okay. But after going through these sample questions, I realized I was not okay. I had a lot of studying and a lot of preparation to do. I’ve distilled those learnings into this course for you. So you should have all this information already. But this is a real eye opener as to the level of detail and the subject matter that you’re expected to know on the real exam. It is.

When I first took this sample question exam, I was a little bit skeptical that the real exam was like this. But it is. This really is a level of detail and the subject matter you’ll be expected to know on the real exam. So it’s a pretty good indicator of your readiness if you can pass these ten sample questions as to whether you’re ready for the real thing. Also, Amazon publishes a learning path of its own, of its own video courses. And I mean, they’re good courses, but it’s a lot of information. It took me about a month to watch this all myself, which I did. But you’ll find that although you’ll learn a lot, a lot of it really isn’t relevant to the exam. You’re going to be spending a lot of time studying things like the internals of elastic Block Store or the details of Amazon Lex. And these are things that really aren’t necessary for passing the exam. So if you do go through these videos that they have, which I recommend, they’re free, why wouldn’t you take them? Right?

But if you feel the temptation to skip through some of the low level storage stuff, yeah, don’t feel bad about that. A lot of that stuff is not really going to show up. However, the stuff under Machine Learning Solutions is definitely helpful, and I would recommend taking that block for sure. Also, if you’re considering taking the big data or data analytics certification first, two different names for the same tests. They’re actually changing the name of the big data specialty certification to data analytics in 2020. Consider taking that one first if you’re going to be taking both of them anyway. The reason is because the Machine Learning exam does build upon the same stuff that you cover in the big data or data analytics exam. So all the data engineering stuff that we covered in this course is covered in a lot more depth in the big data specialty exam. So by preparing for the big data specialty exam and taking that first, you’ll have that entire data engineering domain under your belt before you even get started, which can be in advance.

3. Test-Taking Strategies, and What to Expect

Let’s talk about what to expect on the day of the exam and some strategies for getting through it. It is a three hour long exam. Technically it’s 170 minutes because they allow ten minutes for the surveys at the beginning and end of the course. But you’ll be sitting in that seat for 3 hours straight and that alone takes quite a bit of stamina. I mean, that’s a long time to be sitting there thinking really hard. The good, good news is that you’ll probably only need a little over 2 hours. Most people, including myself, report finishing this in about 2 hours and 15 minutes or so. And that’s even taking my time. So don’t rush through it. It is plenty of time for this exam. There’s a total of 65 questions on the exam and you will need to get a 75% or a better score to pass. But 65 questions, 3 hours. Make sure you take the time to fully understand every question. And I’m going to harp on this later on in this lecture. You have time, guys, so don’t rush through it.

Make sure you understand exactly what each question is asking you, what the constraints that are being placed on your answer are, the things that they’re trying to optimize for. It is really, really important to pay attention to every word of every question because there might be some little tiny requirement snuck in there that might affect your choice of an answer. So don’t skim the questions. Read them, understand them. And remember, on the real exam, they have this little flag capability. So after you answer a question, you can optionally hit a little flag icon. And the way that works is that when you’re done with the exam, you’ll have an opportunity to go back and check your existing questions before you actually submit your answers as your final answers. So by flagging questions, you can quickly go back to questions where you weren’t so sure about your answer and spend a little bit more time on them and think more about the answer you want to give. I think you’ll find that in practice, your first guess is probably going to be your best guess. If you’re spending three minutes on a question and coming up with one of four multiple choice answers, it’s questionable whether you’re going to be able to do a better job. But if you have the time to go back, that’s a good way to spend that time.

Go back, think more about the question, maybe some subsequent questions, maybe think about it a different way. So it’s definitely worthwhile flagging questions you’re not sure about and going back to them later to have another look at them. If time permits. Remember, you can’t bring anything into the room. You’re going to have to take everything out of your pockets and leave it in a locker when you get there. Can’t have any hats. I mean, they’re even like picky about glasses they’re worried about people like having cameras embedded in them and stuff. Obviously, if you need glasses to read, they’ll let you bring them in. But they are super strict about this stuff so nothing comes in the room. No cell phones, just you. You will be provided note paper or a dry array sport or something like that to take notes of your own on. And as some of the questions will require you to do a little bit of math, you will need to make use of that. They’ll also give you some earplugs if you want some silence. I don’t know, I find that kind kind of distracting, but if you like that it’s there and that’s pretty much it. This photo is not of an actual testing center because they don’t allow any cameras or phones in there. So no photos of them actually exist.

But it’s the same idea except you’ll have partitions between you and the next person. So expect to have a room full of people quietly sitting there, clicking away and well, hopefully they’re quiet and you’ll just be sitting there in your own little zone, in your own little cubicle getting through this thing for 3 hours. I would recommend that you think about what time you schedule this thing for. So you want to make sure that all this material is fresh in your head when you’re taking the exam. So after you’ve taken all the practice exams and you’ve really mastered this material, make sure you schedule this thing as soon as possible while this information is all fresh in your head, otherwise you’re going to forget it all. And what was the point of all that preparation? So don’t push this out way out in the future just because you’re nervous about it. Also think about what time of the day you’re at your best. It takes a lot of stamina to get through a three hour long exam. So if you’re a morning person, schedule your exam in the morning. If your energy level is more in the afternoon, schedule it in the afternoon. Be strategic about the time that you schedule this for. And also remember, you’ll probably have a choice of different testing vendors that actually offer this exam and it’s worth checking all of them to make sure that you’re picking the one that has the best availability and the most convenient location for you.

I made this mistake myself when I took my first AWS exam. I just went with the first listing that I saw and it turns out that there was another testing center that was much nicer and much closer to my home and had more convenient times available as well. So don’t just pick one at random. It’s worth seeing what different providers have available for availability for actually taking this exam when the time comes. When you get there, make sure you use the bathroom before you head in. It’s a silly thing to talk about, but it’s real. You don’t want to be losing time to have to raise your hand and allow someone to escort you out of the room and have someone escort you back in just because you forgot to go before you started the exam. So the last thing you should do before you walk through that door is find a bathroom. Guys. Also make sure your energy is up. That involves having fuel for your body.

Make sure you ate something. Don’t go in there on an empty stomach. But don’t eat right beforehand either. You know, after you’ve had a big meal, you kind of crash a little bit while you’re digesting that right? So don’t eat too big of a meal and don’t schedule the exam immediately after breakfast or lunch. You want to give yourself an hour or so for that to start to work its way through your system. But you definitely don’t want to be low on glucose or energy throughout this exam either. Like I said, half of it is just having the stamina of getting through it. That also involves getting a good night’s sleep the night before if you can. I know that’s easier said than done sometimes, especially if you’re nervous about a big exam coming up. But if there’s anything you can do to make that happen, do it. And make sure you like any big exam, review the things that you needed to memorize before you walk in that door.

The specific equations for things like recall and precision and F, one score might be useful. And just review things that you aren’t really sure about, don’t have a lot of confidence about. For example, for me, some of the details of regularization on deep learning was a little bit new to me. So I made sure that I reviewed what the effect of different batch sizes and learning rates would be because some of it’s counterintuitive. So if there’s things like that, you need to review it. Make sure it’s fresh in your head and make sure you’re alert. Whatever works for you. Energy drinks, coffee, I mean water, I don’t care. Whatever works for you. Do whatever it takes just to make sure that you are completely alert and awake throughout this entire exam.

Again, half the battle is just getting through 3 hours of sitting in a chair thinking really hard. Half the game is just stamina. And just make sure you’re ready before you go in. Don’t schedule this exam before you’re actually passing the practice exams repeatedly. This is not a cheap exam for anybody. It’s $300 to take this exam and if you fail it, you’re not going to get that money back. So like I said a million times, you just can’t prepare enough for this from a strategic standpoint. Again, do not rush. You have plenty of time for this exam. So for every question, take the time to understand what they want you to optimize for. Sometimes they’ll say you want to build a system that is cheap. You want to build a system that minimizes developer time. You want to build a system that is fully managed and doesn’t require managing any servers. Make sure you pay attention to those sorts of requirements and the things that you’re trying to optimize for. And if they’re describing a larger system, make sure you understand that system as a whole. Don’t gloss over pieces of it. Those details are likely important if they took the time to put the words in the question. Odds are those words in the question have an impact on the answer that you choose. So don’t just skim the questions as like, the number one mistake you can make. Read it, understand every word of it, and understand what they’re asking you for and the constraints that are being placed on you. If you do the math, your pace through this exam should be about two to two and a half minutes per question. That’s longer than it sounds for one of these questions. They tend not to be quite as involved as, say, the ones on the big data or data analytics exam. So that is a generous amount of time, actually. However, it’s good to keep that number in mind because if you’ve been dwelling on one question for more than a couple of minutes, well, it’s time to make your best guess, flag it and come back to it later if you have time.

Odds are you’re not going to do better than your best guess after two minutes of thinking on it anyway. So cut your losses at that point. You might have time to come back to it later and think about it some more if you want to. Another tip is to use the process of elimination. So if you read a question and you’re like, I don’t know that, I didn’t study that. Oh no, I’m doomed. Don’t panic, calm down. The first thing you should do is just read through the answers. And odds are some of them don’t make sense at all in the context of this question. So if you have a multiple choice of four questions where one of them is right, if you can eliminate two of those questions, well, you got a 50 50 chance to get in that one right at this point, right? So use a process of elimination. Even if you don’t know the correct answer, odds are you can eliminate several of the incorrect answers and get pretty good odds of getting the right answer anyway and just keep calm.

You’re not going to get 100% on this exam. There are going to be questions where you don’t know the answer and you’re not sure about it. That’s okay. That happens to everybody. You don’t have to get 100%. You only have to get 75% to pass this thing. And nobody is going to see your final score except for you. What you’re going to get is a certification. A little email and a little badge that you can put on your social media or whatever, saying, look, I passed the exam with a confirmation link. So people can confirm that you did, in fact pass it. But they’re not going to see the score, they’re just going to see that you passed. So don’t freak out if you don’t get you don’t have to. Just keep calm, keep going through the exam, get the ones right that you can get right. And with those tips, you should have pretty good odds of getting through this whole thing. So if you’ve gone through this course, you’ve gone through these strategies, you’ve gone through the other preparation resources that I have called out to you, you should be in very good shape for taking this exam. It’s really just a matter of stamina at this point. You just have to make sure that you’ve got the energy to get through a three hour long test now. So go out there and good luck.

4. You Made It!

Congratulations on making it through this course. We’ve covered a dizzying array of topics covering the entire world of machine learning, and not just the fun part of training models, but the realworld challenges of obtaining, understanding, and preparing the data that goes into them, and training, optimizing and deploying the models that are built from that data. If you’ve completed this course and passed both practice exams, I’d encourage you to schedule the real exam as soon as possible. While this material is all fresh in your head.

Still, this is a tough exam, but you’re as prepared as you can be right now. Good luck. And tag me and Stefan on LinkedIn to let us know when you pass. This is a certification to really be proud of, and you made it this far. You can do it. Thanks for watching, and on behalf of myself and Stefan, we wish you the best in your career going forward.

5. Save 50% on your AWS Exam Cost!

So I want to show you a little trick that not many people know and that will allow you to save up to 50% on your exam cost if you have done an exam before. So in case you have already passed an AWS certification and you go to the benefits tab, you can see a lot of benefits. And in there, at the very bottom, there is an AWS exam discount benefit, which gives you 50% discount on your next exam. And to claim a benefit, you just click on Claim Benefit. And what this will do is that it will create a code for you. And that code you can use to get 50% off your next exam. So let me claim a benefit right now. And as you can see now, the code has been here, so now I need to use this code. So for this, let me go back to my metrics and I’m going to schedule a new exam. I’m going to use C PSI and go directly to the exam I want to schedule. And this works on any exam as far as I can tell.

So, for example, I’ll go ahead and book the DevOps exam. So here is my exam, and as you can see, it’s €270 for me. So in the Voucher discount coupon, I’m going to enter the discount code I got from before. So from the benefits and this token right here. And as you can see now, I got 50% off, so it became €135 afterwards. So I just saved €135 just by doing this little trick. And so many people don’t know about this, and so they end up spending more for the exam. That what they need. So remember, once you pass an exam successfully, you will get access to these discount benefits and then use them accordingly on the exam. You want to save up to 50% on your exam costs. So hopefully it just saves you a lot of money, and hopefully that’s helpful for you to do more elite certifications. So if you like this tip, just let me know and I will see you in the next lecture.

6. Get an Extra 30 Minutes on your AWS Exam – Non Native English Speakers only

One thing that I think is really cool and worth doing is that if you’re not a native English speaker like me, I’m French, then you can request a special exam accommodation that will allow you to get an extra 30 minutes on your A list certification exams. So I’m going to click on Request accommodation, and for the request type, I can say what I want. And what I want is ESL plus 30 minutes. This is available only to nonnative English speakers while taking an exam in English. Okay? And you only need to apply once, and it will apply for all future exam registrations. So we have ESL plus 30 minutes. This is great. And then I click on create and here we go.

I have requested my extra 30 minutes from exams, so it will go ahead and be approved directly. So here we go. And it doesn’t expire. And so this is only for future exam. So if you have somehow booked an exam before applying for this exam accommodation, please make sure to cancel your request. This is free. And then rebook your exam afterwards. And this will get applied to 30 minutes extra to your exam as well. All right, so that’s it for this lecture. I hope you liked it. And good luck for your exam. I will see you in the next lecture.

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