
So I passed the exam
I probably over engineered my prep routine. For the 3 days leading up to the exam, I ate the same breakfast, studied all morning, ate the same lunch, biked 3.4km (the distance to the test centre) at 12 noon, then wrote a 200-question, 4-hour practice exam. One day that practice exam was made up of 89 questions I had gotten wrong during studying and 111 other questions, randomly dispersed, and I carefully analysed why I got any of them wrong after that. The day before the test, I took an online practice exam and had my laptop completely freeze up on question 187. I had to hard reboot and my progress was lost. I couldn’t learn from any mistakes.
I’m really glad I had the luxury of all that time to prepare. 4 hours is a long time to focus and I noticed that I went through the second half of the questions much more slowly than the first, but because I had done timed practice exams, that didn’t worry me. It also turned out that I was allowed to stop and get food and drink from my locker. Food just wasn’t allowed inside the exam room.
In the end I’m glad I put so much effort into preparing. I could have stopped studying when I was “good enough” to likely pass the exam, but I really found the material interesting and relevant. I feel like the thorough understanding of the material will serve me better than just the credential on my resume.