Free DVA-C02 mock exams

The Developer exam rewards knowing how services behave at the API level, not just what they are for. Mock questions turn on specifics — what a particular call returns, what happens on a retry, which limit applies, how a credential is resolved — and these are exactly the details that feel absorbed while reading and evaporate under time pressure. If your mock score is well below your practice-question score, this is usually why.

Security carries more weight here than developers expect, and it is rarely about writing policy documents: it is about which identity a running piece of code actually assumes, and how a secret reaches it. Misses in that domain are usually conceptual rather than factual, so re-reading the notes helps more than drilling more questions.

Deployment and troubleshooting questions tend to describe a symptom and ask for the cause. Practising those in the review pool is worth more than volume — the pattern is recognisable once you have seen a dozen, and almost invisible before that.

Troubleshooting and optimisation is the smallest domain and the one most often left until last, which is a mistake on a mock-driven plan: its questions lean on the same service internals as the development domain, so studying it late means re-learning material you have already half covered. Bringing it forward usually lifts two domains at once.

If your mock scores are volatile — one paper comfortably clear, the next below the line — the cause is almost always uneven coverage of service specifics rather than luck. Go back to the per-domain figures across several attempts rather than the most recent one; the domain that is consistently mid-table is usually the one actually costing you the pass.