Today I took the Alteryx Core Exam for the first time and thankfully passed with 89% which made me very happy and showed myself that hardwork paid off.
The exam
The exam was 80 multiple choice questions and, was meant to have, 7 practical questions included in this however, I ended up getting 10 practical questions. I am not sure if it is random or it was changed to 10 but it did not end up causing too many issues as some were able to be answered quickly.
Concerns in the Exam
2 and a half hours is a long time, especially with nerves on top of that which raised some concerns throughout. I thought I was going far too slow as I used an hour to answer 20~ questions. Looking back I did have a lot of the practical questions in those first 20~ questions which took up a decent chunk alongside getting used to the wording of questions. Some questions were worded very strangely and had to be re-read some several times.
Thankfully, I finished answering all the questions with 15~ minutes to spare so I could go back to questions I bookmarked. Apart from timing and the weird question format I had no other major concerns.
Tips
Having completed the Micro and Core exams I definitely picked up a few things that would be useful to anyone who is new to the DS or wants to take the exam themselves.
- Familiarise yourself with the tool layouts and what their limitations are - you will be asked a lot of questions about what tool would give you X output and knowing what the tools can do and not do will be invaluable to you
- Have Alteryx open on another screen so you do not need to keep tabbing out of the exam - this goes for testing and double checking answers and is just a nice QOL addition.
- TRANSPOSE AND CROSS TAB TOOL FELT LIKE 80% OF THE EXAM SO PLEASE LEARN THESE EXTENSIVELY
- Do not panic with the time and use the bookmark questions to go back to questions you are stuck on but DEFINITELY put an answer incase you do not have time - you would rather have a 1/4 chance than 0/4
- Use Alteryx challenges in the prep guide to get you used to using multiple tools to reach an output - these are especially useful with the practical questions
- For the practical questions, make sure you check the data types because with nerves at their highest during the exam you may forget to check and some formulas wont work if the data types are incorrect
- Have water next to you - this sounds silly but the exam is a long time and dehydration is only going to hurt your ability to think (I know it did for me)
- Some non-practical questions ask you what you expect the output to be based on X, Y and Z but just to be sure you can create a text input to make the dataset and test it yourself (if the dataset is long just make a sample of it if no join tools are being used) - testing these really helped me because I would not have correctly answered all of these otherwise
- Do the Alteryx Core Practice Exam for a snippet of what the full exam will feel like.
If you are planning on taking the exam soon then good luck! If you do not pass first time around just take it again next week and you'll be infinitely more prepared with one exam taken already and believe in yourself!