Becoming Base SAS Certified Tip #2 - Buy the Practice Test

Hi everyone,

To elaborate on my 2nd point in the before blog post, it's very important to buy the Base SAS Certification practice test. This practice test will give you a great benchmark of what your strong and weak areas are and how your should structure the rest of your studying prior to exam day.


You can purchase the practice test from the SAS Institute for $55 at the link below:
https://support.sas.com/edu/schedules.html?ctry=us&id=851


The practice exam is very similar to the actual Base SAS Certification for SAS 9 exam, but there are a few key differences that you should be aware of:

Number of Questions:
The practice exam has 50 questions, while the actual Base SAS Certification exam has 64 questions. Because the practice exam has fewer questions, the SAS Institute recommends that you use 85 minutes to take the practice exam (vs. 110 minutes on the actual exam).

Exam Format:
The practice exam is delivered on one continuous HTML screen. In contrast, the actual Base SAS Certification exam displays only one question on the screen at a time. You are also able to flag questions on the actual exam and return to them later...but you can't do this on the practice exam.

Keeping Time:
There is a timer displayed on the actual Base SAS Certification exam, but this isn't available on the practice exam.



In addition, the SAS Institute claims that the percentage of question topics on the practice exam match the question weights on the actual Base SAS Certification exam. When I finished taking the practice exam, I went back through and wrote down which chapter each question tested...and for me, the top three chapters/sections were as follows:

1) Creating/managing variables
2) SAS functions
3) Creating list reports


Once you've completed the Base SAS Certification practice test, be sure to go back through the questions you missed and review these areas. Chances are you'll be seeing questions similar to these on the exam day.

I hope this has been helpful for you all. Good luck with your studying, and if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave a comment below!

-SAS Cert