Passed Spring Professional 5.0 certification with 94%.

[Valentine Shemyako]

Hello everyone!
Several days ago I've passed Spring Professional 5.0 certification without attending an expensive course.
Want to thank everyone who shared experience and valuable links related to this and prior versions of certification exam.

In case someone is looking forward to take this certification exam here are some advices:
1. Official study guide is essentialy everything that you need to know to pass the certification. It can be found on the Pivotal certification page.
2. There's a software developer whos name is Ivan Kriszan who has already answered all of these questions and published a book (this book covers official study guide questions). Here's his blog where you can find some useful info (he actually took a certification course and shared his experience).
3. Consult official documentation and make as much examples on your own as possible.
4. Mock exams that I've took were of bad quality in comparison to well-known Java mocks from Enthuware. Unfortunately, it seems, that there's no reliable source of mock exams at the moment.
5. In comparison to OCA/OCP questions - actual Spring certification questions are more general, asking about concepts not about some tricky code execution or compilation errors.
6. Big note to everyone: don't waste your time learning Spring XML configuration. Certification exam doesn't simply ask about that.

P.S. If someone is interested about my own certification path - here's a github repository where I've tried to answer all of the questions from Spring certification exam. The preparation took me about 5 months to be prepared.

[Murat Kutluer]

Congratulations Valentine, great score. Thanks for your sharing.

[Mikalai Zaikin]

Congratulations !!!  

BTW, you do not receive certificate until you do not take training ? but one can take exam without prior taking training ?

[Valentine Shemyako]

You're given a digital badge and a digital certificate after passing the certification exam, even without taking an expensive Spring training. The Badge and certificate are both sent to you via email.
Once again, at the moment Spring training is not required in any way. It is just an additional way to get prepared. An exceprt from FAQ:

Our training courses are the best way to gain the knowledge tested in our certification exams. However, class attendance is not a required step in the certification process.

[Aluha Nguyen]

Congratulations Valentine,

By the way,  I'm looking for a way to join this exam in Viet Nam.

Do you know any information about countries which be allowed to organize this exam?

Best regards,

[gms wacc]

Hello,

I am getting the below error when trying to purchase the spring professional exam from https://store.education.pivotal.io/checkout-step-1
[GatewayTransactionError] Transaction declined.203 - General decline of the card. No other information provided by the issuing bank.



I am complaining and contacting the pivotal since last week.

The only response i am getting is the error from bank side.



Unfortunately, we do not have another way for you to pay for the certification exams.

As I explained, this error is related to your card issuer or bank. And we have no way of fixing that for you.

I have contacted my team and cybersource to get the most information I can for you and that is what they have communicated.

[Himai Minh]

Hi,  Wacc,
I got the same error when I signed up for this exam.
Did the bank call you or email you to confirm the payment?
If not, try to use debit card.

[Bonny Santoso]

Give us some more hints and tips mate.
I want to take the exam, but now I'm scared with some people failed in here and said the exam is hard.
How can I validate that I'm ready for the real exam ?
Surely not simply by answering all the questions in the study guide.

[Himai Minh]

Hi, Bonny,
My tip is to take online courses , read the books and get the hand dirty to do practice as suggested by other people.
This exam is really hard for sure.
There is no such a mock exam that you take and pass immediately.
I know some other easier exams, you can read the study guide and pass it within 2-3 weeks.
But this Spring exam is totally different. It is much harder.

[labzar othmane]

Hello guys

I took the exam and i succeed, soi want to share with you my experiences and my advices:
 1) Understand Exam Topics.
 2) Join a Good Course.
 3) Choose a Good Book or Study Guide: Spring in Action , ...
 4) Choose a Spring 5 Simulator : for me i purchase this mock exam spring-certification-questions[dot]com with more than 250+ questions with explanation and last version, it's help me so much in the preparation, so i recommend it.
 5) Make your own Notes.

Regards

[Himai Minh]

Hi Labzar,
Would you mind to share more information about what names of  books, courses from which online schools, links to tutorials you read ?

[Bonny Santoso]

@labzar othmane

Hi mate, could you give me some idea about the exam questions ? how are they compared with the mock exam in that site ?

[Bart Korbel]

Hi,
I'm just after passing the exam with score 400 (whatever this means).
The exam now tells you how many boxes you need to tick, e.g. "Given the class below, which statements are correct? (select two)" etc.

From all the mock exams I done the one that matches the actual difficulty the closest is Abdelahad Satour's: https://www.ad-satour.com/information-technology/technologie-certifications/all-what-you-need-to-know-to-pass-vmware-spring-professional-certification/#h-mocks
It's also free. Don't bother with others (the ones on certification-questions site are especially bad - outdated, with incorrect answers and broken usability on the app).

On top of this I did Dominik Cebula's course on Udemy. This one is a must IMHO. It also has mock exams which are rather on the easy side, but still good once you really get to understand the answers.

Other notes I used are on this GitHub repo: https://github.com/MrR0807/SpringCertification5.0

I didn't read any books.

Hope this helps.

[Rade Koncar]

Hi, thanks for the valuable info. I was going to ask about multiple-choice questions, but your post says it all. Congrats!

[Weili Ong]

Bart Korbel wrote:Hi,
I'm just after passing the exam with score 400 (whatever this means).
The exam now tells you how many boxes you need to tick, e.g. "Given the class below, which statements are correct? (select two)" etc.

From all the mock exams I done the one that matches the actual difficulty the closest is Abdelahad Satour's: https://www.ad-satour.com/information-technology/technologie-certifications/all-what-you-need-to-know-to-pass-vmware-spring-professional-certification/#h-mocks
It's also free. Don't bother with others (the ones on certification-questions site are especially bad - outdated, with incorrect answers and broken usability on the app).

On top of this I did Dominik Cebula's course on Udemy. This one is a must IMHO. It also has mock exams which are rather on the easy side, but still good once you really get to understand the answers.

Other notes I used are on this GitHub repo: https://github.com/MrR0807/SpringCertification5.0

I didn't read any books.

Hope this helps.

Hi Bart, I tried one of ad satour's mock exams, but I only received a list of answers I submitted to email, I did not get which answers are correct or wrong. May I know if you have the correct answers to these mock exams? Thank you.

[Bart Korbel]

Hi,
That's the problem with these tests. What I did was to copy-paste, while taking the test, the contents of the test page into a Word document. This way I had record of the answers I gave and then compared them with the solutions in the email.
Hope this helps.
Bart

[Andy Smithonian]

The AD Satour mock test is good but the answers have to be checked. The emailed answers are not all correct.

[Tas Litra]

Here's a very good source of answered questions of the official certification study guide, that seems to help a lot:
https://mossgreen.github.io/

For example https://mossgreen.github.io/Spring-Certification-Spring-Boot/