AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Written 2025-09-10
Today, I wrote and passed the AWS Certified Developer – Associate exam (DVA-C02), which I've been studying for as part of my job. I figured I'd share how I prepared, in case that would be helpful to anyone.
Coming in, I had barely any knowledge of AWS - the most I'd ever done was set up a Lightsail instance to use as a VPS for a project in university. I studied for about three weeks using Stephane Maarek's Udemy course and practice exams. My score on the exam was 836, with the minimum score being 100, the maximum being 1000, and the pass being 720.
In my experience, that the course covered all of the content needed to pass the exam, plus some added detail (which I enjoy), and the practice exams were actually a bit harder than the real one. That likely isn't the case in general, however, as the real exam is randomized and can have varying levels of difficulty, which are compensated for when your score is scaled from 0-50 to 100-1000. As you probably know if you're already preparing for the exam, there are 65 questions of which 50 are graded and 15 are unmarked and used for research. Questions are multiple choice (4 options) or multiple-response (5+ options where you pick 2+).
I will say, if you can, write in a Pearson VUE testing center. The software needed to write online is beyond clunky, the OnVUE site is plagued with redirects and broken links, and you need to be running Windows. I personally had issues running the system test before my exam and ended up calling Pearson support, only to find out that the server was down. Luckily it came back before my exam started!
In terms of study strategy, I took notes in Markdown as I watched the lectures, and this helped for two reasons: first, because I had to take my time watching the lectures and was forced to actually process information, and second because the result was that notes to revise with. Markdown is nice because it allows you to have rich text to read with syntax highlighting for code blocks while not being clunky enough to really slow you down (I'd never take notes in HTML, for example). VS Code lets you write Markdown in one pane and view a preview in another pane, which updates near-instantly. Of course, if you're into paper notes or Notion (or a FOSS alternative), do that!
For the practice tests, I did them all and scored high 70s and low 80s after completing the course. You can't really interpret the real exam score as a percentage because of how it's calculated, but if you did it'd be fairly close to what I got on the practice tests. No real strategy for these besides doing them and looking back over my notes when I ran into trouble.
Basically, my tips for this exam are nothing more than general exam strategy (study and do practice tests) with the additional advice to write in-person if you can (but I know what it's like to be inconveniently far from a testing center). Certs can be seen as just another box to tick off, but in the course of preparing for the exam I genuinely learned a lot about a wide range of AWS services and how to architect cloud-based software. All of the material is very useful and marketable!