Microsoft certifications are very difficult exams and the new Azure certification exams are no exception. For this reason there are some who would post questions directly from these exams to share with others. These collections of questions taken / copied directly from the exams are called “Braindumps” and there are a number of reasons they are bad to use.

These collections of questions taken / copied directly from the exams are called “Braindumps” and there are a number of reasons they are bad to use.

The most obvious reason against braindumps is that they violate the agreement you sign when taking a Microsoft exam to not share any of the questions from the exam itself. Here are some additional reasons to stay away from braindumps:

1. Who wrote the braindump? Can you trust the answers and the questions themselves are accurate and correct? Most likely you can not as they are shared “anonymously.”
2. Don’t cheat yourself! By copying questions directly from the exams you are cheating yourself. If you pass the exam with these, then did you really learn the material and exam objectives covered? Probably not.
3. Braindumps cheapen the exams meaning. By using braindumps and not learning all the material well enough to pass the exam honorably, then you are helping to cheapen or demean the value of not just that one certification, but all Microsoft certification. Nobody wants their hard earned certification to be meaningless to have achieved.

Why waste your time with cheating and unreliable braindumps, when it’s much better to just learn the material? What you’re likely really looking for are practice exams; which are written based off the same documentation and exam objectives as the real exam, but don’t contain any copied questions from the exams themselves. This way you can test your understanding of the material without cheating or affecting the value of the certifications.

There are a number of certification practice test vendors, and Microsoft even links to them on the certification exam information pages, along with books and other materials to help you study. These exams are in no way blind, and after all, Microsoft does want to you pass, so long as you understand the exam objectives well enough.

If you’re looking for practice tests for the new Azure certification exams, here’s a link to one I created to help myself study for the 70-532 Developing Solutions with Microsoft Azure exam. This practice test is geared towards developers, but all the questions that don’t contain code should help for studying for both the Architecture (70-534) and Infrastructure (70-533) exams as well.

Developing Microsoft Azure (70-532) Practice Test

This practice exam is also open source and on GitHub, so feel free to contribute your own questions to it if you’d like by making a pull request.

Happy studying!

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.