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Alteryx Core Exam Tips

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

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Are you taking the Alteryx Core Exam soon? I hope these tips can help you.

 

Hi, my name is Bruna Guglielmi, and I’m from Cohort 26 at Sydney Data School.

So, last week I got an Introduction in Alteryx, and I got my Core Certificate after 1 day and a half of learning. I was pretty impressed with myself, so I will share what I did here in order to help since you can follow similar steps or take only what’s interesting for you and apply it.

 

How to study:

    • Have a look at the Alteryx Core Exam Prep Guide
    • Get some Weekly Challenges from the community website and filter the challenges that are at the Core Exam Level of difficulty → here
    • Get some Weekly Challenges from the community website and filter the challenges that are at the Core Exam Level of difficulty → website – trust me, it’s going to be useful.

Study a few exercises and see how you go and if you are familiar with all the tools that are in the guide. The tools there are all the ones you need to know, so you won’t be surprised in the test with a tool you never heard about before.

 

What to have open on the test day:

As you may know, the Alteryx Core Certificate is an open-source exam, so you can look online anywhere for information in order to answer the questions.

  • Have Alteryx open with a few data inputs there, any data that you can quickly use for testing in case you don’t know the answer to a question.
  • Also, have a tab with the text input tool and a simple random table you can type or have a few things typed for testing as well. This will help you save some time.
  • If you forget what a tool is for or if you also want to check a result without adding a data input or a data text, use the examples on the data tools. (If you click on the data tool you want to explore instead of dragging it to the canvas, you will have a description of the tool and also an “Open Example” you can click that will open a new canvas on Alteryx with an example of that tool – as you can see in the image.)

 

 

I felt short on time for the test. 80 questions in 2 hours and a half means you have approximately 2 minutes per question. It’s not much since you will also have around 10 dataset questions (ones where you need to download a dataset from the question, use Alteryx to solve it, and select the right answer).

Also, even though they are multiple-choice, they have similar answers, so if you don’t read properly or don’t pay attention to all the details in the images, you will probably choose the wrong answer. So really pay attention to all the minimum details in these questions and answers.

 

Tips for the exam time itself:

As we talked about, you will also feel that you are probably short on time. It’s really easy to just lose time analyzing the questions to see what’s the right answer, so if you feel like a question will demand a lot of your time, just bookmark it (it’s on the top right side of your question) and move to the next one. On the top left side, you can click on a dropdown menu and see all the questions you bookmarked and get back to them later.

And since all the questions are worth only one point, just try to answer all the ones you can and, in the end, get back to the ones that need more time using the time you have left.

 

That’s it! I hope this gives you some guidance and also helps you on exam day. Best of luck, and see you soon! 🙂

 

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Alteryx Core Exam Tips

This post was originally published on The Data School blog between 2018 and July 2025, before our program was renamed to MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. References throughout this article to “The Data School” or “DS” all refer to what is now MIP’s Analytics Career Accelerator. The program, its people, and its commitment to launching outstanding analytics careers remain the same – just under a new name.

If you are having trouble viewing this article, please report it here. 

Are you taking the Alteryx Core Exam soon? I hope these tips can help you.

 

Hi, my name is Bruna Guglielmi, and I’m from Cohort 26 at Sydney Data School.

So, last week I got an Introduction in Alteryx, and I got my Core Certificate after 1 day and a half of learning. I was pretty impressed with myself, so I will share what I did here in order to help since you can follow similar steps or take only what’s interesting for you and apply it.

 

How to study:

    • Have a look at the Alteryx Core Exam Prep Guide
    • Get some Weekly Challenges from the community website and filter the challenges that are at the Core Exam Level of difficulty → here
    • Get some Weekly Challenges from the community website and filter the challenges that are at the Core Exam Level of difficulty → website – trust me, it’s going to be useful.

Study a few exercises and see how you go and if you are familiar with all the tools that are in the guide. The tools there are all the ones you need to know, so you won’t be surprised in the test with a tool you never heard about before.

 

What to have open on the test day:

As you may know, the Alteryx Core Certificate is an open-source exam, so you can look online anywhere for information in order to answer the questions.

  • Have Alteryx open with a few data inputs there, any data that you can quickly use for testing in case you don’t know the answer to a question.
  • Also, have a tab with the text input tool and a simple random table you can type or have a few things typed for testing as well. This will help you save some time.
  • If you forget what a tool is for or if you also want to check a result without adding a data input or a data text, use the examples on the data tools. (If you click on the data tool you want to explore instead of dragging it to the canvas, you will have a description of the tool and also an “Open Example” you can click that will open a new canvas on Alteryx with an example of that tool – as you can see in the image.)

 

 

I felt short on time for the test. 80 questions in 2 hours and a half means you have approximately 2 minutes per question. It’s not much since you will also have around 10 dataset questions (ones where you need to download a dataset from the question, use Alteryx to solve it, and select the right answer).

Also, even though they are multiple-choice, they have similar answers, so if you don’t read properly or don’t pay attention to all the details in the images, you will probably choose the wrong answer. So really pay attention to all the minimum details in these questions and answers.

 

Tips for the exam time itself:

As we talked about, you will also feel that you are probably short on time. It’s really easy to just lose time analyzing the questions to see what’s the right answer, so if you feel like a question will demand a lot of your time, just bookmark it (it’s on the top right side of your question) and move to the next one. On the top left side, you can click on a dropdown menu and see all the questions you bookmarked and get back to them later.

And since all the questions are worth only one point, just try to answer all the ones you can and, in the end, get back to the ones that need more time using the time you have left.

 

That’s it! I hope this gives you some guidance and also helps you on exam day. Best of luck, and see you soon! 🙂

 

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