Passing DA-100
Friday, June 4th, 2021
My experience will help you pass the Power BI Exam.
With less than two months of practice (20 full-length days, since I studied three days a week) I scored a 903 on the Power BI DA-100 exam (700 is passing).
Here’s what I did:
- Worked through the free DA-100 training on Microsoft’s website to get an overview. I created free practice quiz questions related to the training.
- The best way to prepare for a test is to do plenty of practice problems. So I went through the Official Practice Test from MeasureUp. I started with practice mode on subtopics (Prepare the data, Model the data, etc). Then I went through the exam in Certification mode (just like the actual exam) twice…. on the second attempt I scored below 70%, which made me nervous! As I discovered gaps in my knowledge, I’d search the Microsoft documentation.
- Sometimes tried things in Power BI.
Even after my preparation, I had a big surprise. I could use common sense to answer some questions. For example, a question asked for a calculation that would return a certain result based on a dataset. I thought about the steps needed to go from the data to the result. Then I figured out which options corresponded to the order of the steps. That seemed to work, even though I’d never seen some of the functions! The function names give you a good hint about how they work.
It’s a multiple-choice test, so thinking carefully about which option makes sense goes a long way.
Before I started preparing, my only experience with Power BI was using it to look at my bank and credit card data exported from Mint. So going from zero to certified is doable.
Hope that helps!