AWS Certified Security - Specialty (SCS-C02) Exam Experience: Copy This Study Approach to Pass

I passed AWS Certified Security - Specialty (SCS-C02), so I am sharing my experience.

Table of Contents

Exam Results

• Score: 799/1000 (passing score: 750)
• Exam date/time: Monday, September 30, 2024, 13:00–
• Pass notification (email): Monday, September 30, 2024, 19:16

Background Knowledge

• I had already passed SAA-C03, DVA-C02, SOA-C02, and DAS-C01
• For AWS security, I was at the level of “I know about it, but I’m not sure I have it organized systematically”

Study Method (Conclusion: CloudTech Only + ChatGPT)

I studied for about 1 month. I went through the CloudTech question bank 3 times. Specifically, I studied using the method I introduced in my article about taking the SOA exam. Please check the article above for details.

The Actual Exam

• My impression was that about half of the questions were close to past questions.
• There were a lot of questions around IAM, Secret Manager, Organizations, SCP, SecurityHub, and GuardDuty.
• The question text was long, and it started draining my stamina partway through. Looking at the answer choices first, getting a rough sense of what was being asked, and then reading the question helped reduce the mental load.

Thoughts

For SCS, knowledge is important, but even more than that, I felt you need the stamina to read through long question passages and the precision to narrow down the correct answer from plausible-looking choices (usually forcing you to choose between two). So with the question bank, it is important not to memorize question-and-answer pairs, but to get to the point where you can explain “why that answer is correct.” For that explanation practice, bouncing ideas off ChatGPT is good enough.

Final Thoughts

Learning what assumptions a cloud platform as large as AWS uses when designing security was extremely useful. Even in situations where I do not use AWS, I feel that just thinking about security measures with a similar design philosophy can at least move things in a better direction.

For AWS certifications, studying with CloudTech × ChatGPT feels like all you need.