Chapter 16. Final Preparation

Congratulations! You made it through the book, and now it’s time to finish getting ready for the exam. This chapter helps you get ready to take and pass the exam. In this chapter, you learn more about the exam process and how to register for the exam. You also get some useful tips that help you avoiding some common pitfalls while taking the exam.

Generic Tips

In this section, you get some generic tips about the exam. You learn how to verify your exam readiness, how to register for the exam, and what to do on the exam.

Verifying Your Readiness

Register for the exam only when you think that you are ready for it. This book contains a lot of material to help you verify your exam readiness. To start with, you should be able to answer all the “Do I Know This Already?” questions, which you find at the beginning of each chapter. You should also have completed all the exercises in the chapters successfully. At the end of each chapter, you can find the end-of-chapter labs. These are the first real way of testing your readiness. The end-of-chapter lab questions are formulated in the same way as you might expect the real exam questions to be, so they are a good way of finding out whether you are ready for the exam.

Now that you have worked through all the material in this book, you are ready for the test exams in this chapter. Make sure that you can perform all the tests in the test exams before you register for the exam.

No sample answers are provided for the test exams, and that is on purpose. On the real exams, nobody tells you what you’ve done wrong if you fail on specific tasks. You should be able to find out yourself whether you have performed specific tasks successfully. If you are in doubt about specific tasks, chances are that you are just not ready for these tasks. The idea is that you should make sure that you feel comfortable with the exam topics. And if you are, you’ll be able to verify the playbooks that you’ve written.

Registering for the Exam

There are two ways of taking the RHCE exam. You can either take it as a classroom exam or as a kiosk exam. The classroom exam is typically on Friday only, and it is offered primarily by Red Hat to provide an exam at the end of a course. Therefore, most of the people who are with you in the exam classroom have taken four days of course training before taking the exam, and for that reason, classroom exam availability is limited.

For a long time, the classroom exam was the only way to take the exam. For some time now, though, Red Hat has provided kiosk exams too. A kiosk exam is an individual exam, where you work through the exam tasks on a kiosk computer. This monitored computer is in a booth in an exam center, where you are monitored through multiple cameras while working on the exam tasks. The good things about a kiosk exam are that it is individual and that you schedule the exam time and place yourself at your convenience.

You can register for the exam through redhat.com or through a training company. It does not really matter where you buy it because you end up at the same exam anyway. It might be easier, though, to get a discount while booking through a local training company. Booking through Red Hat is faster normally because you have direct access to Red Hat. Notice that specific policies may apply to specific countries, and not all options may be available in your area.

If you book a classroom exam, you get an invitation for the time and date the exam is scheduled. If you book a kiosk exam, you get a voucher code that you can use to book the exam venue, time, and date yourself.

On Exam Day

Make sure to bring appropriate identification to the exam. To be allowed to take the exam, you need an approved government ID. Normally, a passport or driver’s license will do; other types of proof may be accepted in your country as well. Do not forget it; without ID, you will not be allowed to take the exam.

Also, make sure you are on time. It is a good idea to arrive half an hour before the exam’s scheduled starting time. If you are late, you will normally be allowed access to the exam, but you will not get extra time. So, just make sure that you are on time.

After proving your identity, you are introduced to the exam environment. Because of the nondisclosure agreement that every test-taker signs with Red Hat, I cannot tell you in detail what the exam environment looks like. I can tell you, though, that there will be an environment in which you have to work. Depending on the exam you are taking, this consists of one or more servers. There is also a list of tasks that have to be performed. Work your way through the tasks, read all well, and you will pass the exam.

During the Exam

The tasks that you have to work on during the exam are not necessarily presented in the most logical order. Therefore, it is a good idea to start reading through all the tasks before you start working on the first assignment. While reading through all the tasks, you can decide which is the best order to create the configurations needed. Determine the best possible order for yourself because it may not be obvious.

Another important tip is to read carefully. Not many people know how to read carefully anymore, and you are probably among those people. IT administrators are very skilled in scanning web pages to retrieve the information that they need. That skill will not help you on the exam. Reading skills will. I cannot stress that point enough. According to my estimate, 40 percent of all people who fail the exam fail because they do not read (they scan instead). So, let me give you some tips on how to read the exam questions:

• If English is not your native language, or if you master one or more additional languages, you can switch the language in which questions are presented. Maybe the English language question is not clear to you, but the question translated in another language is. So, if in doubt, read the translation as well.

• The English language questions are the most used and best scanned questions. Exam questions are perfect because Red Hat has made a tremendous effort to make them perfect. Given the fact that most of the exam candidates work on English language questions, the quality of English language questions is the best. You are free to use translated questions, but you should use the English language questions as your primary source.

• To make sure that you do not miss anything, make a task list for each question. You have scratch paper with you during the exam. Use it to make a short list of tasks that you have to accomplish and work on them one by one. This approach helps you to concentrate on what the exam question is actually asking.

• After you have worked on all assignments, go have a cup of coffee (you are allowed to take a break during the exam). When you return, read all questions again to make sure that you did not miss anything. Taking a small break is important; it allows you to take distance from the exam, after which you will read the questions as if it is the first time that you have seen them.

Another important part of the exam is the order in which you work on the assignments. Even though I cannot talk about specific exam content, some topics need to be fixed before other topics. Make sure that you deal with those topics first. If you do not, fixing the other assignments will be more difficult or impossible.

The Nondisclosure Agreement

The RHCE certification is one of the most sought-after certifications that currently exist in IT. It represents a real value because the person who takes the RHCE exam has worked through a list of realistic assignments and knows how to do the job. It is in everybody’s interest to help maintain this high value. The nondisclosure agreement is an important part of that.

The RHCE exam still represents real skills because the content of these exams is not publicly available. Please help keep these exams valuable by not talking about questions that you saw on your exam. A person who knows which questions are asked will have an easier exam than you did, which means that the certificate value will diminish, which will also make your effort less valuable. So, please help protect what you have worked so hard for and do not talk about exam content to anyone.