You may remember a blog I wrote at the end of April, all about my hopes and fears for the Tableau QA exam. Well, first things first, I passed – yay! Let’s revisit some of those fears and see if they were justified.

Fear #1: Running out of Time

This first fear was unfounded for me. I finished with 20 minutes to spare – and that included going over all my flagged questions, and even my unflagged questions too. Maybe I got lucky, but I didn’t find the questions in the real exam to be as convoluted as in the mock (although many of my fellow cohortians will disagree with me that the mock is harder than the real exam, so I won’t try to make that claim!)

As for my strategy, I was still undecided about what questions to tackle first when I went into the exam. However, my decision was made for me as I was looking at the obscure knowledge questions. I found these much harder to prepare for and actually found it quite difficult to find the answers on Google. So if I couldn’t quickly work out the answer, then these were the questions I flagged for later! As well as the LOD question, of course…

Fear #2: Not being able to write or talk

Before my exam, I was lucky to have Mark Edwards reach out to me and say that he shared this fear. He had a great tip to open a Notepad session on the remote PC if I felt the need to “talk” a question through. In reality, I found that I had mastered the skill of muttering to myself quietly without moving my lips too much by the time the exam rolled around – and that worked fine!

Fear #3: It’s got to be LODs

Genuinely, LODs didn’t cause me any issues! Thank goodness! My top tip there would be to make sure you understand the cohort analysis example in Bethany Lyons blog and all will be well.

So overall…

The exam wasn’t as bad as I feared it would be! If you’ve done the examples/mocks/practices and you felt you were 80% of the way there, then you should be fine in the real thing too. Just have confidence and try to relax. The remote PC set up is a bit strange, but try not to panic and give yourself time to get used to it. You actually get 5 minutes to read the instructions at the start – which I found to be a nice surprise.