Passed SAA-C03 in 4 days!
I passed SAA-C03 in 4 days with 780 score.
Not saying this is the best or healthiest way to do it lol, but maybe useful for people who are short on time and already have some AWS background.
Bit of background:
I have around 2 years of professional AWS exposure.
One year was more on ML/data/MLOps side. Kinesis realtime streaming and batch processing, ETL jobs and an inhouse Auto-ML pipeline with Spark/EMR jobs.
The other year was more DevOps/platform work, mostly around RDS migrations.
So i was not starting from zero, but my experience was mostly practical. I am currently job searching, so i decided to take SAA-C03 both to strengthen my theoretical AWS understanding and to have it visible on my CV.
Also i have pretty heavy ADHD and daily studying is very hard for me to sustain. Studying 2 hours a day for 4-8 weeks sounds much harder to me than just setting a close exam date and going full cave mode for a few days. So i made a bet with a friend, booked the exam on May 1 for May 5, and basically forced myself into a 4-day camp. No social life, almost no sleep, ordering food, just focus mode.
First reality check:
I started with the official AWS Skill Builder practice question set.
So yeah, that was a nice slap in the face. Especially after paying the money for the exam.
What I did after that:
I created a dedicated ChatGPT project only for this exam.
Whenever I got a question wrong, I made it:
- save the concepts behind that question into a mistake bank
- explain why the correct answer is correct
- explain why every wrong option is wrong
- extract the trigger words from the question
- give me an “exam memory line”
- tell me whether the service is usually a real answer or mostly a distractor
- explain in which scenario AWS expects that service
- connect related services together, not explain them in isolation
This helped a lot because SAA-C03 is mostly about decision patterns.
Main study source for the first 3 days:
CertPro Deep Dive’s YouTube question series, Link.
I went question by question.
For each question, I paused and tried to answer first.
Then I watched the explanation.
Then I asked Chatgpt to explain it in simpler exam logic.
Then I kept asking follow up questions, sometimes even checked some AWS documentations, until the concept really clicked.
At the beginning, one question could take 15 to 45 minutes. Later it got much faster.
In the first 3 days, I finished 87 questions from that series. If you have more time, I suggest you to continue with the whole playlist, at least maybe till q200. It is a good question bank, especially when paired with active explanation and review.
Last 24 hours:
I bought Tutorial Dojo.
Because time was limited, I first did one random question test and got 78%.
Then I did the section-based tests properly. Same way as CertPro Deep Dive’s, but also while reading answer explanations of TD.
My scores were:
- Design Secure Architectures: 70%
- Design Cost-Optimized Architectures: 73.3%
- Design High-Performing Architectures: 76.67%
- Design Resilient Architectures: 63.3%
Definitely not amazing scores..
At this point I had around 4 hours left before the exam. I had not slept for the last 24 hours, and in the last 4 days I probably slept around 10 hours total. I took my coffee then I asked Chatgpt to take all the mistake bank it had collected, all explanations, all exam tips and turn them into 4 separate section-based PDF notes.
After that, I uploaded those PDFs into NotebookLM and asked it to generate SAA-C03 style questions for each section.
The questions were not extremely hard, but that was actually useful because almost every question was based on something I had already missed before. So it became a very fast final review loop.
Also this was nice because I could do them anywhere. On the toilet, on the road, laying in bed, whatever. When I had energy, I solved proper mock exams on my computer. When I was tired or resting, I just opened NotebookLM and repeated questions based on my own mistakes. I was just checking the exact patterns that had already caught me once.
Especially, in the last hour, I just repeated those generated questions again and again. Most of them took like 5–10 seconds because they were already based on my previous mistakes. Also they were not huge wall of text questions, they were more direct, with the exact keywords/cases I needed to remember.
When the real exam started, I could recognize many patterns much faster.
My takeaways
If you already have some AWS background, I think mock question learning style is much better than passively watching long courses.
Tutorial Dojo was very close to the real exam style. Some questions in TD felt a bit lazy written, but honestly, many real exam questions felt close enough that I wouldn't skip it. If someone finishes all TD questions properly and understands every explanation, I think it will be hard to not to pass.
CertPro Deep Dive was also very useful, especially for a free resource.
So my style was more like:
do question -> get it wrong -> understand why -> save the mistake -> repeat the same pattern later
then see the mistake in Notebooklm
That worked much better for my brain.
Resources I used:
- AWS Skill Builder official practice question set
- CertPro Deep Dive YouTube SAA-C03 question series
- Tutorial Dojo SAA-C03 practice exams
- ChatGPT project for mistake tracking and exam logic
- NotebookLM for final mistake-based revision questions
Again, not recommending the sleep schedule lol. But if you already have some AWS background and you are short on time, this type of mock-heavy route can work.
Posted May 10, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC