AWS Exam Syllabus

DEA-C01 syllabus, skills measured, and exam topics

The AWS DEA-C01 exam covers the official skills measured for AWS Certified Data Analytics - Specialty. Use this page to review the current syllabus, major domains, and official resources before you book the exam.

What to know before you study

These sections explain the role, audience, and exam framing behind the outline.

Introduction

  • The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam validates a candidate's ability to implement data pipelines and to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize cost and performance issues in accordance with best practices.
  • The exam also validates a candidate's ability to complete the following tasks:

Target Candidate Description

  • The target candidate should have the equivalent of 2–3 years of experience in data engineering. The target candidate should understand the effects of volume, variety, and velocity on data ingestion, transformation, modeling, security, governance, privacy, schema design, and optimal data store design. Additionally, the target candidate should have at least 1–2 years of hands-on experience with AWS services.

Recommended general IT knowledge

  • The target candidate should have the following general IT knowledge:

Detailed outline

Scan each section as a working study checklist instead of one long wall of text.

Recommended AWS knowledge

  • The target candidate should have the following AWS knowledge:

Job tasks that are out of scope for the target candidate

  • The following list contains job tasks that the target candidate is not expected to be able to perform. This list is non-exhaustive. These tasks are out of scope for the exam:

Response types

  • There are two types of questions on the exam:
  • Select one or more responses that best complete the statement or answer the question. Distractors, or incorrect answers, are response options that a candidate with incomplete knowledge or skill might choose. Distractors are generally plausible responses that match the content area.
  • Unanswered questions are scored as incorrect; there is no penalty for guessing. The exam includes 50 questions that affect your score.
  • The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.
  • The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam has a pass or fail designation. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
  • Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.
  • Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.
  • Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table of classifications contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when you interpret section-level feedback.

Unscored content

  • The exam includes 15 unscored questions that do not affect your score. AWS collects information about performance on these unscored questions to evaluate these questions for future use as scored questions. These unscored questions are not identified on the exam.

Exam results

  • The AWS Certified Data Engineer - Associate (DEA-C01) exam has a pass or fail designation. The exam is scored against a minimum standard established by AWS professionals who follow certification industry best practices and guidelines.
  • Your results for the exam are reported as a scaled score of 100–1,000. The minimum passing score is 720. Your score shows how you performed on the exam as a whole and whether you passed. Scaled scoring models help equate scores across multiple exam forms that might have slightly different difficulty levels.
  • Your score report could contain a table of classifications of your performance at each section level. The exam uses a compensatory scoring model, which means that you do not need to achieve a passing score in each section. You need to pass only the overall exam.
  • Each section of the exam has a specific weighting, so some sections have more questions than other sections have. The table of classifications contains general information that highlights your strengths and weaknesses. Use caution when you interpret section-level feedback.