Last week (just before the Christmas break) we took the Alteryx Core Certificate, even though we had only been using Alteryx for about 5 days.
The certificate is a 2 hour exam that is taken online. The exam is open book, which was definitely helpful but it’s definitely important to have taken some time to understand what will be in the exam as the 2 hours does go quickly – there is no extra time, nor can you pause the exam.
The exam consists of 80 multiple choice questions which can be broken down into 2 categories
- 73 questions worth 1 point
- 7 practical questions worth 3 points - These 7 questions will require you to download a (small)dataset and run it through Alteryx to get the expected result.
Knowing the above, I knew that it would be important to allocate more time to these 7 practical questions, since they are worth about a quarter of the exam.
For the rest of the questions, I roughly allocated 1.5 mins to each – some were much easier than others but everything in the exam was something we had covered during our teaching sessions.
For the harder questions, I made use of the Alteryx documentation online and I also ran some of the problems through Alteryx, if I couldn’t visualize the solution in my mind (The text input tool was incredibly useful for replicating the mini datasets in the questions)
I finished the exam with 5 minutes to spare and fortunately I passed with 88%. The pass grade is 80% but failing the exam was not something I was ever too worried about as you can retake the exam every 7 days. Even if you don’t feel ready to take the exam, it’s great experience and, if you do have to retake it, you’ll have a better understanding of how the questions look like.