Can I use ChatGPT to prepare for an IT interview or certification exam?

Looking for a little help preparing for your upcoming IT interview or exam? If you are, then you might look to AI for a little help! Find out if that will hinder or heighten your interview/exam in this clip!

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Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

• Using ChatGPT for Exam Prep: ChatGPT can be used to prepare for certification exams or technical interviews by generating practice questions and providing detailed explanations.
• Creating Specific Questions: It’s beneficial to ask ChatGPT to create specific practice questions, such as those related to a particular topic like Power Automate flows, to save time and focus on areas where you need more practice.
• Refining Prompts: When asking ChatGPT to generate questions, it’s important to be specific about the subject matter and format, such as requesting multiple-choice questions without “all of the above” options.
• Generating Multiple-Choice Questions: ChatGPT can generate multiple-choice questions and explain why the correct answers are correct, which helps in understanding the material better.
• Adjusting for Better Results: If the initial output isn’t perfect, you can refine your prompts further, like specifying not to include “all of the above” options or ensuring the correct answer is always a certain choice, to get more accurate and useful practice questions.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Our second question for today is: Can I use ChatGPT to prepare for either an ID certification exam or a technical interview? From even the previous question, you were already saying yes, but there were some things that you wanted me to try. So, let me take off the slide, go back to ChatGPT, and I’m all ears. Can we, and how can we?

To take the first half of that question about continuing your certification prep, in our previous example, we took an existing practice question and let ChatGPT answer it and expand. I had mentioned that you could also do the opposite and ask ChatGPT to create certification practice questions for you. That’s a big time saver because you may be stuck on creating Power Automate flows, for example, and just create a question dealing with Power Automate flows. Again, it’s all in crafting the most granular prompt you can, explaining why the correct answer is correct, and generating a fictional business case. I found that it can go right up to the advanced level. I’ve had it in the past generate a bunch of practice questions for AZ-305, the Azure architect exam, so I know it’s capable of both associate and expert-level material.

Okay, let me try to do it, Tim, without your help, and then you can tell me how I can make it better. What I’ll do is I’ll just tell it, “Please create three practice questions for the SC-900 exam.” Actually, let’s do the AZ-800 exam since I’m working on the SC-900. This is fully outside of my set of skills, so this will be really interesting for me, and you’ll be the one to validate if it makes sense or not for the AZ-800 Microsoft exam.

We specified three practice questions. Let’s see what it actually creates for us. We can say one, we can say ten. It should be able to give us the questions. What do you think it will give us by default? Ah, there we go, it started. The first recommendation I would make myself, this is just my own opinion, would be to have it do one at a time. That’s just my own personal preference because I wouldn’t want to see too much response, and there are some limits on how many characters or tokens it can give back in a response as well. Another point would be we’re not telling ChatGPT what subject matter from the exam. I would suggest refining it: create an AZ-800 practice question dealing with, say, IIS or IIS authentication. Again, the point is to be as specific as possible and explain why the correct answer is correct. That’s probably how I’d do it.

Let’s leave it to finish. So far, from what you’re seeing on the screen, if you want to read the questions out loud for the people listening to this as a podcast, tell us what you think. Given you created the course for the exam on Pluralsight, how good do you think those questions are?

Alright, for those in the audience listening, if you don’t know, AZ-800 and AZ-801 are the two exams required to earn the Windows Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification. It’s a mid-level associate cert aimed at people who want a non-Azure Windows Server cert, like Microsoft has had for dozens of years now. They took it away, but anyway, let’s see here. Question one says: As part of a data migration project, you need to move data from an on-premises SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database. What Azure service can you use to perform the migration, and what steps should you follow to accomplish it? Yes, that’s a solid question, but here again, because we weren’t explicit, notice that it’s the question but not the answer. I would say, “Please create a multiple-choice AZ-800 practice question.”

I’ll start typing with all the feedback you give me. I’ll start typing the next one, but keep going for the second one. It’s still generating from what I see here. That first one’s definitely a solid question that’s in scope for the exam. Two says: Your organization is planning to migrate its on-premises VMs to Azure. You need to develop a plan for the migration that ensures minimal downtime and no data loss. What tools or services can you use to migrate, and what steps should you take? Again, it’s nicely phrased, it’s on target. Something else we could do after you send in this refactored prompt is ask it to generate multiple choices for each of the three. I might say, “For the previous three questions, generate multiple choices and explain.” You can keep refactoring, but that’s an excellent hybrid migration question. Both one and two are on migration, which is a part of the exam, but this is just ChatGPT making its best guess because the original prompt is not specific. Three says: Your organization is planning to implement Azure Site Recovery to protect critical workloads in case of a disaster. What are the different types of replication that are available, and what factors should you consider? That’s a pretty deep question indeed. All of these go beyond the fundamentals level. They’re definitely more complicated and relevant to what you’ll see on the live exam, so thumbs up from me.

Let me do a stop generating on that one, and then before I put in the new prompt, let’s actually expand like you said. For the previous three questions, please generate multiple-choice options. I know you’ll laugh at me, but I like to be polite with my AI, so I add “please” and things like that. You don’t have to, but just in case people say AI will take over the world, since I’m logged in with my Microsoft account, I want to be on their good side. If it ever comes to that, I want them to remember that Vlad said “please” and “thank you,” so I’ll keep doing it.

It looks like we should have sacrificed one more old VM. It’s our first error. Let me give it a thumbs down here. No, I don’t want to submit feedback. Let’s go back to it. Let’s see if it remembers it or if it will start from scratch. No problem. I think it’s because we didn’t let it finish. It was still generating. I did stop generating on it, and then it was like, “Hey, I didn’t actually finish what you had.” Hopefully, this time it will complete. Great, we have three different questions. We’re not going to reread them; we just want to learn. If I say, “Please give me multiple-choice options for the previous three questions,” there we go. Let’s see if it’s able to.

Okay, so it actually started by rewriting the question, which is nice, and then it gave me an ABCD. I’m noticing right off the bat there’s a “D: All of the above.” I’m being picky here, but you’ll never see an “All of the above” choice on a Microsoft exam. You can add that to your prompt: do not include “All of the above.” Or if you want to make sure that “A” is always the correct answer, you could just say, “Make choice A the correct answer.” It’s really great how responsive ChatGPT is to your instructions.

Let’s try the last one. We said, “Please generate one multiple-choice practice question around the IIS topic of the AZ-800 Microsoft exam.” There we go. Let’s see. It’s thinking. I guess the more things we add, the slower it will be or the slower it will appear to be to make it look like it’s typing. Let’s take a look at what it’s going to create for us. I think also latency might be a factor because we’re recording this during business hours, at least across the U.S. and maybe the tail end of business in Western Europe. Generally speaking, I think at night, at least here in the States, I get snappier performance from it.

It really likes the “All of the above.” It sure does. Let me try and do what you told me last time here: do not include an “All of the above” option. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see a question and there’s an “All of the above,” I always kind of want to pick “All of the above.” I feel like it’s a trap if it’s not “All of the above.” Well, there it is. Being specific with chat really means you have to be very specific.