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My (Inexperienced) Experience with CompTIA Certs

This posts details my experience studying and taking the following CompTIA certification tests:

I should probably note that I do not have actually have any professional IT experience (I am working on changing that :-). I just thought that perhaps some folks out there studying for these tests might like the perspective of a newbie like me that they can relate to.

Time

Each of these tests took me roughly two months each to study for. I passed each of them on my first try with the following scores:

While I was studying for each test, I was in high school. However, I had a lot time of downtime in my classes so that combined with the fact I didn't participate in many extra-curricular activies meant I had a decent bit of study time. If I had to guess how many hours I spent studying a day, it would probably be around three hours? I would study every day, only taking breaks if I got sick or I was particularly busy.

Studying

Here is a list of the study material I used for each test and how much it costs:

As you can see, I did not have to splurge on study material. Along with the above material, I also did some hands-on stuff which I will also detail.

CompTIA Exam Objectives

This will be your most important study resource. Each CompTIA exam has a set of exam objectives, which you can basically consider your rubric for the exam. It goes into great detail about what topics will be tested for on the exam. You can find it for free on CompTIA's website, or various other places on the web. Later on I'll write on how you can use the exam objectives during your studies.

The exam objectives will also have a huge list of acronyms that test takers are encouraged to look over. Many people will make the mistake thinking they have to remember every single acronym on that list and what it represents. That is not really the case. While you should probably have some familiarity with the acronyms, one should focus on studying the exam topics themselves.

Professor Messer Video Course

Professor Messer's video course was my primary study material for all three tests. Messer's videos are nice because they short yet packed with information. They do not tend to stray out of the exam objectives, so a lot of what you see in the videos you can be sure will show up on the exam. Each of his videos also has a slideshow to go along with it that is pretty convenient for copying notes. The slides can be a little bit terse and uninformative, so I wouldn't recommend just blindly copying them down. Messer himself will typically go into more detail about each subject, so you'll want to combine what he's saying with the notes on the slides.

Messer's videos are good enough to pass, but many people say that you should not solely rely on him to study. While his videos do cover all the material on the exam objectives, he does not usually go into quite as much detail as the exams do, so it is important that you pair him with some more detailed study material. I paired him with the ExamCram book, which I will go into more detail on later. I'd also like to add that Messer's Network+ course does a poorer job than his A+ videos on going through the material. There are many sections in the objectives that he does not touch, and there also many sections that barely touches upon. I would definitely not recommend on solely relying on Messer for your Network+.

Professor Messer also has two other useful resources for studying that often get overlooked; his monthly study group livestreams on YouTube and his weekly/semi-weekly quizzes on his website. His livestreams typically consists of a PBQ-style question and around 5 multiple choice questions. They make for some good practice. His pop quizzes are simple multiple choice questions. They are not really anything like the questions on the actual exam, but they still do make for some decent practice.

Professor Messer Tests

For $30, you can get a set of three 90-question practice tests from Professor Messer's website. The tests consists of 5 PBQs, and 85 multiple choice questions. These questions do a better job at emulating the exam's actual question style. Also, like Messer's other study material, his tests stick strictly with the exam objectives, so you will not have to wonder if a question on the test will actually be relevant or not for the real exam. In my personal opinion, these tests are lot better than Dion's practice tests. One critique I have with these tests is that the PBQs are nothing like the actual exams. Most of the PBQs are nothing more than just match the term with the purpose, the PBQs are on the actual exam are more complex than that. The multiple choice questions are still fairly accurate. Before taking the real exams, I was scoring around 85-95% on the Messer exams first try. So aim for that range. Subsequent attempts can still make for good practice, but subsequent attempts might not be as accurate gauges of your readiness as it's likely you will have remembered the answers to many of the questions. If you want to retake the practice tests, it's best to space them out by a couple of weeks so that you will forget most of the questions.

It should be noted that Messer never wrote practice tests for the N10-008, and the 009 practice tests are not out yet.

Jason Dion's Practice Tests

Jason Dion sells a set of 6 90-question practice tests on Udemy for each CompTIA certification test. I don't know if Udemy still does this, but when I went to buy the tests, they would be listed at ~$100. If you came back later or opened the site in a private window, the tests would randomly go on sale to around $10-$20. So make sure to catch them when their on sale.

Just like with Messer's tests, Dion's tests are written to emulate the style of wording of the real exams. Dion does this less gracefully than Messer, as many of questions can be entire paragraphs of length only to end up asking a very straightforward question that one could answer ignoring the rest of the information provided by the question. Dion also likes to reuse questions from older exams, even if they are not applicable to the current exams. If you feel like a lot of the stuff in Dion's tests weren't covered in your studies, just know that that's normal. The scenarios in Dion's PBQs are more accurate to what you would find on the real exam, but suffer from the problem of usually being simple multiple choice or select all that apply questions. Before I took the exams, I was scoring in the 80% range, although I've heard many passed when they were in the 70s. So I'd say aim for the 70s and above.

ExamCram

I received a digital copy both the ExamCram A+ book and Network+ book for free from my library. Be sure to check your library to see if they have any study material available (although beware that a lot of material may be outdated). I did not read the entirety of either book. I would mainly read through sections that I felt like I did not understand all to well from Messer. That is the benefit with any book as opposed to any other medium, they typically allow you to go much more in-depth into a topic. I probably would've done just fine without this book, but it was free so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Google

This one should be straightforward. If there is something in your studies that you do not understand and none of your material adequately explains it, just google it. The benefit of googling something is that you will usually find people with practical IT experience explaining something, and they will often explain the practical application of some topic. This can be nice because of a lot of CompTIA study material tend to explain the concept behind something which can make it difficult to comprehend it's use in the real world. Another benefit of googling is you can find out how much stuff your studying is bullcrap. For example, you probably will not have to know maximum distance 1000BASE-SX multimode fiber can support off the top of your head.

The Process

In this section, I will detail my study process, start to finish.

The very first thing I would do is go through the entirety of Professor Messer's vidoe course. Throughout the course, I would take notes on anything that I thought would be worth noting. I would typically get through a section a day. If I encountered something that looked like it might be somewhat tedious to learn, I'd try to get it down that day. For example, when I encountered all of the port numbers, I rote-memorized them the day I went through that section so that I would not have to put learning them off to some later date. I did the same thing with subnetting, WiFi standards, printer troubleshooting, and some others that I can't remember right now. After I finished a section, I would consult the exam objectives to see if Messer covered everything. If anything was missed, I would consult either the ExamCram or google.

Once I had finished Messer's videos, I would then start digitally transcribing my notes. Transcribing my notes gave me the opportunity to see if there were any topics that I did not understand very well.

Once I had finished my notes, I would then start employing a study strategy that I call "dumping." Basically, I would choose a random section in the exam objectives. Then I would go through each topic in that section and write everything I knew about it. If I was able to write a paragraph of information on that topic, then that meant I probably knew the topic well enough for the exam. If I was struggling to explain a topic, then that meant I did not understand it well enough and I mark it down as a topic I would need to study more thoroughly in the future. During this process, I would also add topics to the exam objectives themselves if I thought they were relevant. For example, I added the bootrec command to section 1.2 on the 220-1102 exam objectives (the one concering Windows CLI tools), because the bootrec command is important to know for many boot problems CompTIA wants you to know how to deal with.

Throughout this process, I'd also make sure to get some hands-on practice. You don't have to get hands-on practice for every topic on the exam. For example, here is some of the hands-on practice I got when I was studying for my Network+:

While I was employing this study strategy, I would also take practice exams from either Messer or Dion to gauge my readiness for the real exam. The moment that I felt any sort of confidence that I could possibly pass the exam, that would be when I would schedule the exam. In 2/3 of my tests, I would schedule it 3-4 weeks later. Due to money problems, I had to wait until I had money to schedule the other exam, so I scheduled it a week later in that case.

The Exam Itself

Due to the candidate agreement CompTIA has you sign before you take the test, I can't disclose any questions that appeared on my exams. But I'll try to explain what the exams were generally like without violating the candidate agreement.

The exam can have a maximum of 90 questions, but I believe all of my exams had around 70-75 questions. I had 4-5 PBQs in all of my exams. Many speculate that the more PBQs you have, the less multiple choice you get.

I'll give some advice on the PBQs. The advice that everyone gives that I agree with is that you should skip the PBQs and save them for the end of your test. I think people tend to exaggerate the difficulity of the PBQs and make it seem like they're impossible to prepare for. In my experience, the PBQs are basically just slightly more difficult questions testing your knowledge of the exam objectives. As long as you know the exam objectives, they should not be terribly difficult. The most difficult PBQs you can get are ones that have you do stuff at the command line. I only had those on my Network+ exam, and they also weren't as scary as they seemed as you can type a help command that shows you a list of what commands are available to you. All you really have to do is just remember what the commands do.

As for the multiple choice questions, again, I believe people to tend to exaggerate their difficulty. In my experience, most of the questions weren't too obtusely worded. There were definitely some that felt like compelte bull, but I never felt like I was at any risk of failing the exam because of those questions.

Exam-specific stuff

Here I'll briefly write about some stuff you should know for each exam.

220-1101

Know you're printers and how to fix them. Know the troubleshooting methodology. Know your exam objectives.

220-1102

Know your macOS. Know your Windows administration programs. Know your malware removal procedure. Know your exam objectives.

N10-008

Not relevant anymore :-/. Know your troubleshooting methodology. Know your routing protocols. Know your exam objectives.

End

So that's all the advice I have to give about taking the tests. I might at some point write about how effective the certifications are for actually getting a job. But I'll probably save that for when I get more experience in the IT industry.

Links

10/18/2024