Hi,
As seems to be customary I thought I would share my experiences of doing the DCA exam. I found out today that I passed and I had a long wait to find out but I suspect the Easter holidays have not helped in that regard. Like everyone else has already said there was nothing like loads of lab time to really feel confident with tasks, and to be able to do them without really needing to think what the steps are.
I think this exam is easier than the DCD exam if only because the tasks are less subjective as you can either complete the task or not. With the design exam I sometimes found myself in two minds about a particular question.
My one tip is definitely to only use 5.0 versions of the products to learn on. I didn't as I was using the same lab for a big design project and that cost me as I thought something was wrong in the test environment when in fact it was a subtle difference in 5.1 which completely threw me and whilst I could have answered the questions quite happily I assumed something was wrong - my bad! 
Good luck to everyone either just starting out on the VCAP journey or about to sit the exam, I think it is really worthwhile experience. Now its a question of whether I want to try the VCDX, I have a design in mind but it does seem to be a big leap into the unknown......
Andy