Detailed Review Of Preparation

This particular exam is nominated as entry level but the basics are also important as they are not covered by the professional exams. These are more high level and this is like a hands-on training. So keep that in mind.

As always with Google training I started with Coursera that has 5 courses with qwiklabs. That means that besides the videos you need to do exercises in a real GCP environment and often they are graded. So the progress you make in those labs is measured and only if everything is done correctly the score is maximum. After main modules you get some quiz answers that you are supposed to know from the material that was covered before. To succeed you need 2/3 right at least. After every course you get a congrats mail with a link to a certificate. It is nice but only the real certificate when you pass the exam has some value i.m.h.o.

After that I took the Pluralsight course for preparing the ACE exam. It is not so specific as Coursera and takes less time but every subject is touched so it helps you to find out if you remembered everything from Coursera. Keep in mind, as said, that almost every basic GCP component is addressed.  If you are studying for data engineer the focus will be on ML and AI as well as all the different data and storage options. You don't get questions about how you manage an app engine e.g.

Google practice exam

This practice exam from Google itself will give you some insight of the kind of questions you can expect. Not the content but the way questions are put. Be prepared for questions with the words: the best, the most efficient, NOT, etc.

Because often you can mark 2 answers as not valid (if you studied ;-)  otherwise everything could make sense) there are 2 more to choose from. Sometimes you need to fill in more than 1 option and those are the trickiest ones as you could have 2 out of the 3 answers right. I don't know how Google handles those questions/answers. But most of them are single answers and you need to read them carefully. Sometimes one word can make the difference. And sometimes they both seem right but then you take into accout the words in the question such as "the best".

Everytime I needed some more explanation on subjects I used google for Wikipedia or any other source to help out. Also for translations because I am not a native English speaker so this is always a problem with the exams. If you don't know the meaning of a word or more (in the questions or answers) you have a problem. You then need to decide if the context is enough to get the right answer., More time is not a solution; a dictionary is but it is not allowed.

The last thing I did was Linux Academy. The have this course also and in my opinion it is even better because they are more focussed on the exam. You watch the videos and at the end you have a full practice exam. It's great although don't think that you will get the same questions.

Because I plan my exams beforehand there is also some time pressure for me to study; it works for me. Maybe other people want to be ready and confident before planning it. That's personal.

On the day itself I make sure that I had a good night rest and have eaten before I start. You will get 2 hours and that's enough. If you think the question is too dificult or time consuming skip it for the time being and mark it so you can go back at the end. Otherwise you will be nervous when the time counter is ticking away and you still have a lot of questions to answer. If you need more than 2 minutes for the questions go to the next one and I am sure that a lot of them can be answered within 30 seconds. Then at the end you have more time  to read the marked questions again carefully.

I can not give away questions with answers but be prepared that, although you do all of it above, there are questions about things you probably never heard of. Sometimes they are test questions that don't count anyway but you don't know that. Even if you don't know those answers I am confident that your score can be high enought to pass. But to be ready for those questions you should have some background knowledge of the counterparts from the GCP resources. So what is used on prem (VM's, Storage, Network, Databases) is often compared with what GCP has to offer and especially for migration purposes.

Hopes this helps a bit; I know that a lot of this information is somewhere available on the internet but now you get it directly from me :-)

I wish you all a lot of success with the exam