I have been doing the delta exams since the London release to maintain my ServiceNow certifications.

London -> Maldrid -> New York -> Orlando -> Paris -> Quebec -> Rome -> San Diego

That's eight releases of delta exams in four years. Since I have two mainline certifications, I have been doing two delta exams per release; the equivalent of four delta exams per year. Before San Diego, never have I once failed a delta exam! I also challenged myself and was always excited to take them on the first day that they were made available.

Then comes San Diego.

This is the first time I have failed my Certified System Administrator (CSA) delta exam on the first try (and second try). To be fair, I haven't been working on the platform as a ServiceNow system administrator for the past seven months, and have been doing more focus work on the Security Incident Response application.

In the past, the delta exams have been fairly easy. I could sometimes even pass the delta exams simply by looking up answers in the release notes as I was doing the exams within the allotted time.

This time around, I also had three delta exams to complete due to the new CIS - Security Incident Response mainline certification I recently got this year. I was starting to feel a sense of exam fatigue after studying and completing two online proctored exams in the past two months (ServiceNow and Microsoft). Knowing that the delta exams are non-proctored with 3 retakes, I thought I could wing it like before. But I was wrong.

Here are My Lessons Learned from the Failed Delta Exam Attempts

1. Remember this is the delta exam. ALWAYS focus on the release notes and what's new. Forget about what you learned before, and unlearn to re-learn what's new. ServiceNow constantly re-invents itself. New features and capabilities can sometimes be a slight name change.
2. Read the questions and answers multiple times and review them before submitting. There was a couple times I skipped answering a question. Maybe a glitch or I pressed "next" twice and missed a question?
3. Reference the San Diego Release Highlights docs page. Most of the questions for the delta CSA are based on the Now Platform section.
4. If you can't find more information on the release highlights page, search the docs site using keywords to learn more about the new feature.
5. Sometimes the release notes can be too overwhelming. The text in the doc definitely will help you find the answers to the exam questions. But to really learn and get a visual understanding, I recommend taking a look at videos and trying out the new features in your Personal Developer Instance (PDI). I find the following two videos helpful:
6. The delta exam questions are the same if you failed and retake the exam. So look into the questions that you are unsure about and study them. Note: the system does switch the order of the answers around, so watch out for that.
7. Don't do the delta exams and read the release notes when you are tired or distracted. It's not a good way to retain knowledge.

As someone who doesn't work day-to-day as a platform administrator, and is more of an implementation specialist/developer, here are the delta exam rankings from the easiest to the most difficult for me:

1. CIS-Security Incident Response (9 questions)
2. Certified Application Developer (6 questions)
3. Certified System Administrator (7 questions)

At the end of the day, the purpose of the delta exams is for you to learn new features and capabilities. If your career direction has changed or you have moved from a generalist to a specialist or vice versa, I think it's also a good time to re-evaluate what's important to you. Is it worth it to keep maintaining all these certifications? How many more certifications are you planning to take and how invested will you be in up-keeping them?

Hope this article helps some of you with passing the San Diego Delta Exams.

If all goes well, you will see something like this in your Now Learning:

Good luck! Don't forget to complete yours before Aug 3rd!