GitHub Copilot exam GH-300

I posted previously about the training for GitHub Copilot. In this post, I going to talk about the exam, GH-300.

Exam scope

The exam has seven domains:

Domain 1: Responsible AI (7%)
Domain 2: GitHub Copilot plans and features (31%)
Domain 3: How GitHub Copilot works and handles data (15%)
Domain 4: Prompt Crafting and Prompt Engineering (9%)
Domain 5: Developer use cases for AI (14%)
Domain 6: Testing with GitHub Copilot (9%)
Domain 7: Privacy fundamentals and context exclusions (15%)

What these domains really are about

Domain 1: Copilot is trained on public code from Github repos. What problems and consideration does this mean for code suggestions generated by Copilot?

Domain 2: This is all about the differences between the individual, business, and enterprise plans. This domain is the one that focusses on the features of Copilot and is the largest domain.

Domain 3: This domain is about what happens before and after your prompt is sent to GitHub to generate suggestions. You also need to understand how Copilot adds context to your prompt.

Domain 4: How to craft effective prompts for GitHub Copilot.

Domain 5: Where Does GitHub Copilot assist in the software lifecycle e.g., refactoring.

Domain 6: Creating tests with GitHub Copilot

Domain 7: This domain is about control of what is used by Copilot from your repos and organizations, use of public coding matching, security, and safeguards. The final objective is about figuring out why GitHub Copilot doesn’t provide any suggestions.

In summary, this exam is very broad but also requires you to know the intricacies of how GitHub Copilot generates code suggestions.

Somethings you need to be aware of:

The exam was originally run by GitHub before it was migrated under Microsoft Learn. This migration changed the domains and structure of the exam. So, there is a lot of content for the exam that is out of date.
There have been recent several deprecations to GitHub Copilot since the exam was published e.g, knowledge bases (replaced by Spaces) and fine-tuned custom models.

The Exam

Number of questions ~ 65
Time – 100 minutes
Question types:

Single choice
Multiple choice

Note: Unlike other Microsoft exams, there is no access to Microsoft Learn.

Practice Assessment

I’ve written before about Practice tests and I found the Microsoft GH-300 Practice Assessment a little easier than the exam and it was actually useful in my preparation.

Summary

Personally, I came away from preparing for the exam with a lot of respect for GitHub Copilot and its capabilities. I now know how to really use Copilot when developing code.

I see many people dismissing this certification as it is just prompts right. No, GitHub Copilot is a well thought out AI assistant to write better, more secure, more optimized code quicker with fewer errors. I believe the certification has true value.