IBM Qiskit Exam: my four weeks preparation

After dedicating approximately a month to preparing for the IBM Certified Associate Developer - Quantum Computation using Qiskit v0.2X, and successfully passing the exam (making 3 errors out of 60 questions), I am sharing my experience in this blog.


First of all, let me be very clear: I cannot and will not share exam questions due to the exam policies. Nevertheless, what I can and will share is how I organized myself, the materials I used, and the preparation tests I undertook along the last month.


First of all, let me provide some context regarding my prior knowledge before the preparation. I have acquired previous knowledge in quantum computing through my attendance at two quantum computing courses, participation in two IBMQ challenges, reading of books, articles, and papers on quantum computing and quantum machine learning (some of which I have shared in my previous blogs). While this prior knowledge is advantageous for preparation, it's important to emphasize that the test specifically focuses on developing with Qiskit, and such knowledge alone may not suffice.


To begin with, the IBM certification site (1) offers valuable insights into exam organization and preparation. Specifically, the section of the page that outlines the contribution of each topic in the exam served as a guide to focus on the most relevant topics. For instance, the content of Section 1 – 'Perform Operations on Quantum Circuits' – represents nearly 50% of the exam questions, and Section 9 – 'Construct Visualizations' – contributes to another 19%."


On average, I dedicated approximately one and a half hours on weekdays and four hours on weekends to gather references on the topics listed in each section and to test code related to those topics. Writing code helped me memorize the methods and parameters used by the platform’s objects and methods. Always prioritizing on the weight of each section, I distributed the study of the full content of the exam over the first three weeks.


On the last week I focused on reviewing the concepts, searching for, and taking free practice exams from internet. Here, I would recommend to approach such materials with some caution, as not all the questions are correctly formulated nor the answers may not always be accurate. On the flip side it is worth noting that most of the questions can be verified by writing code. Whenever I was unsure, I verified the answers through code, which provided me an additional benefit of refining and strengthening my knowledge.


Finally, two days before the exam, I took the paid assessment from VUE. It helped me to get used to the test structure and to invest some final efforts on areas where I had most of the errors. During the test I noted down answers for which I was unsure, so that I could verify and test later.


If you are interested in taking the exam, you can find all the code and references I used for preparation in my GitHub repository (2).


The code is organized according to the sections of the exam, with each notebook containing references to the respective topic. All the code was enhanced and thoroughly tested during the learning process. I hope it can be useful for those preparing for the test!


Concluding, taking the exam not only earned me a new certificate but also provided valuable insights into the Qiskit platform and various ways to efficiently obtain the results I need. If you are a frequent user of the Qiskit platform, I definitely recommend going for the exam!


(1)    https://www.ibm.com/training/certification/C0010300
(2)    https://github.com/mrromaniuc/quantum-computing/tree/main/IBMCertifiedAssociateDeveloperQiskit

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