With SAS skills in such great demand, getting SAS certified is an investment in your professional development that can really pay off.

If you’re considering getting certified, you may have heard about one of our more popular preparation tools: SAS practice exams. SAS practice exams on the Pearson VUE platform are similarly designed to the actual SAS exams in both section balance and difficulty and are often cited by our candidates as an effective way to prepare for the real thing. Still, you may be asking yourself the question: Are SAS practice exams worth the cost?

To answer this question, and to be as nonbiased as possible, we analyzed actual data before coming to a conclusion (we are SAS after all). For our evaluation, we reviewed a year’s worth of results for the SAS Base Programming for SAS 9 practice exam on the Pearson VUE platform and then compared those results to the candidate’s performance on the actual exam. Here are two key observations:

• 95% of candidates who scored a 70 or higher on the practice exam, passed the actual exam.
• On average, candidates taking the practice exam realized a 13 point improvement on the actual exam.

We also saw that candidates who scored high on the practice exam could then take the actual exam and perform very well. If candidates scored near the 70% mark, we saw that they spent time to study the areas of weakness, as revealed by the practice exam, and then took the actual exam and performed well. In general, the lower the practice exam score, the more time that was required to study weaker areas.

So, are practice exams worth it?  In a word, yes, but with a caveat. The practice exam must be well constructed and provide an experience that is representative of the actual exam. An effective practice exam should be as near the difficulty level, objective coverage, length, and look and feel of the actual exam as possible. That’s what we strive for with SAS practice exams on the Pearson VUE platform. Of course, no one can guarantee that passing any practice exam will result in a candidate passing the actual exam, but, SAS practice exams on the Pearson VUE platform are a strong indicator of how well a candidate is prepared for an exam and can show where additional study and practice is needed.

Any questions, drop us a note at certification@sas.com.

Best of luck in your career endeavors.
Terry Barham
Sr. Manager, SAS Global Certification

SAS practice exams on Pearson VUE

A note about SAS practice exams on the Pearson VUE platform. These practice exams are designed to be similar to the actual SAS exams in section balance and difficulty. They offer an extended time limit (six hours) and the ability to pause the exam to allow you to complete it at your convenience. You have 90 days to complete the practice exam from the date of purchase. At the end of the practice exam, a dynamic score report provides practice exam performance detail and the ability to review all questions.