Day 29: Take the Exam First, Review Later: How to Actually Use Bryan Krausen's Practice Tests

Overview

The Two Modes

Bryan Krausen's Terraform Associate 004 Practice Exams ship every exam in two flavors:

• Practice mode — answer a question, see the result and the full explanation immediately, then move to the next one. No timer. No pass/fail at the end.
• Exam mode — 60-minute timer, 57 questions, no feedback until you submit. You get a score, a domain breakdown, and then you can review every question with its explanation.

Same questions. Same pool. The only difference is when you see the answer. That timing is the whole point.

Why Exam Mode First

The real Terraform Associate exam is 57 questions in 60 minutes with no feedback, no docs, and no second tries. If your only rehearsal is Practice mode — answering with the explanation visible right below the question — you are not rehearsing the exam. You are rehearsing a different activity: reading questions while looking up answers, which is a thing you will literally never do on exam day.

Four things you can only measure under Exam-mode conditions:

1. Whether you actually know the answer, or just recognize it. Recognition is what happens when the explanation is one scroll away. Recall is what happens when it isn't. They feel identical until the timer starts.
2. Your real time-per-question. Practice mode lets you spend three minutes on one question because you got curious about a docs link. Exam mode forces you to make the call every working professional makes on the real exam: flag it, move on, come back if there's time.
3. Your stamina past question 40. The first 30 questions are easy to focus on. Questions 40–57 are where misreads happen, where you start picking the first plausible-looking option, where the second cup of coffee wears off. You don't find that wall in Practice mode because you're not under load.
4. Your calibration. "I'm 95% sure" vs. "I'm 60% sure" only matters when you can't immediately verify which it was. Exam mode is where you learn that your 95s are actually 80s and your 60s are actually 50/50 — which is the single most important thing to know walking into the real test.

None of these show up in Practice mode. All of them show up on exam day.

What Peeking Costs You

Peeking — reading the explanation before committing to your own answer — feels efficient. It isn't. Three specific costs:

• You burn the question. Every question in the pool is finite. Once you've read the explanation, that question can never test you again; it can only confirm what you now already know. Across six exams there are roughly 350 questions. Wasting them in Practice mode means you arrive at the real exam having never actually been tested on the material — only taught it.
• You overestimate your readiness. Practice mode scores tend to be 15–25 points higher than Exam mode scores on the same content. That gap is the gap between "I read this and it made sense" and "I can produce the answer in 60 seconds with no reference." Walking into the real exam thinking you're at 90% when you're actually at 70% is how people fail.
• You skip the most valuable feedback. The single most useful diagnostic is the wrong answer you were confident about. Practice mode hides this — you saw the right answer first, so you can't tell which ones you would have gotten wrong on your own. Exam mode surfaces them in the post-exam review screen, and those are the questions worth your study time.

If you bought the course, you bought ~350 questions and the explanations behind them. Don't spend the questions before you've taken the exams.

The Protocol

Here's the routine I used for exams 3 and 4 — it's a two-pass loop per exam, not a one-shot:

Pass 1: Take the exam in Exam mode, cold.

• 60-minute timer on. No docs, no notes, no pausing. Phone in another room.
• For each question, give yourself one of three labels in your head: confident, probably, guessed. (You don't need to write them down — the act of labeling is what calibrates you.)
• Flag every probably and guessed. If time remains at the end, revisit guessed first, probably second.
• Submit. Look at the score and the domain breakdown. Do not start reading explanations yet.

Pass 2: Structured review, same day.

• Open the post-exam review screen. Sort by wrong first.
• For each wrong answer, read the explanation, click through to the docs link Bryan provides, and write a one-line note somewhere. This is important as these notes will be worth reading prior to taking the real exam.
• Then sort by correct but flagged (the guessed ones you happened to get right). Read those explanations too. A correct guess is still a knowledge gap, just one that didn't cost you points this time.
• Skip correct and confident. Reviewing things you knew yields nothing.

Between exams:

• Wait at least 24 hours before the next one. The forgetting curve is what makes the next exam diagnostic instead of recall.
• Spend 20 minutes on the docs pages from your one-line notes. Not the whole section — just the specific paragraph the wrong answer pointed to.

That's it. The protocol is boring on purpose. The structure is what makes the time spent count.

When Practice Mode Is Actually Useful

Practice mode is not useless — it's just badly named. It's a teaching tool, not a practice tool. Two cases where I actually use it:

1. After all six Exam-mode runs are done, as a final pass to read every explanation back-to-back without the test-taking overhead. At that point the questions have already done their diagnostic work, and Practice mode becomes a fast way to consolidate the explanations into a single sitting.
2. For a domain you bombed. If your first Exam-mode run shows you at 40% on Domain 7 (state), filtering Practice mode to that domain alone is a reasonable way to drill — after you've taken the exam cold, not before.

The general rule: Exam mode generates the data, Practice mode helps you interpret it. Never the other way around.

Two exams left in the pool. They'll get the same treatment, then a cold re-run of exam 1 to check whether the review work is actually retaining. After that, the real exam.

Day 30 is the post-exam reflection — what the protocol got right, what it missed, and what I would tell someone starting Day 1 of their own 30-day run.