Chapter 35

Final Preparation

Congratulations! You made it through the book, and now it’s time to finish getting ready for the exam. This chapter helps you get ready to take and pass the exam in two ways.

This chapter begins by talking about the exam itself. You know the content and topics. Now you need to think about what happens during the exam, and what you need to do in these last few weeks before taking the exam. At this point, everything you do should be focused on getting you ready to pass so that you can finish up this hefty task.

The second section of this chapter gives you some exam review tasks as your final preparation for your CompTIA IT Fundamentals+ FC0-U61 exam.

The exam user interface shows some useful information—namely, a countdown timer as well as upward question counter. The question counter shows the question number for the question you are answering, and it shows the total number of questions on your exam.

Unfortunately, some questions require lots more time than others, and for this and other reasons, time estimating can be a challenge.

The number of questions on the exam is 75, and they are multiple choice. The exam takes 60 minutes. So far, so good. However, some questions are easier than others. If you’re not careful, you could run out of time. You need to make sure you take no more than 45 seconds per question. To make that easier to figure, make sure you answer four questions every three minutes. Keep up that pace, and you’ll be done with a few minutes to spare. Be sure to allow enough time for rechecking.

• Get some earplugs. Testing centers often have some, but if you do not want to chance it, come prepared with your own. (They will not let you bring your own noise-canceling headphones into the room if they follow the rules disallowing any user electronic devices in the room, so think low tech.) The testing center is typically a room inside the space of a company that does something else as well—oftentimes a training center—and almost certainly you will share the room with other test takers coming and going. So, there are people talking in nearby rooms and others office noises. Earplugs can help.

• Plan your travel to the testing center with enough time so that you will not be rushing to make it just in time.

• If you tend to be nervous before exams, practice your favorite relaxation techniques for a few minutes before each practice exam, just to be ready to use them.

• Rest the night before the exam, rather than staying up late to study. Clarity of thought is more important than one extra fact, especially because the exam requires so much analysis and thinking rather than just remembering facts.

• If you did not bring earplugs, ask the testing center for some, even if you cannot imagine you would use them. You never know whether it might help.

• You can bring personal effects into the building and testing company’s space, but not into the actual room in which you take the exam. So, save a little stress and bring as little extra stuff with you as possible. If you have a safe place to leave briefcases, purses, electronics, and so on, leave them there. However, the testing center should have a place to store your things as well. Simply put, the less you bring, the less you have to worry about storing. (For example, I have been asked to remove even my analog wristwatch on more than one occasion.)

• The exam center will give you a laminated sheet and pen, as a place to take notes. (Test center personnel typically do not let you bring paper and pen into the room, even if supplied by the testing center.) I always ask for a second pen as well.

• If available, grab a few tissues from the box in the room, for two reasons: One, to avoid having to get up in the middle of the exam. Two, if you need to erase your laminated sheet, doing that with a tissue paper helps prevent the oil from your hand making the pen stop working well. (Yes, that’s often why pens seem to not work, and then later work, on dry erase boards!)

• Leave for the testing center with extra time, so you do not have to rush.

• Plan on finding a restroom before going into the testing center. If you cannot find one, of course you can use one in the testing center, and test personnel will direct you and give you time before your exam starts.

• Do not drink a 64-ounce caffeinated drink on the trip to the testing center. After the exam starts, the exam timer will not stop while you go to the restroom.

• On exam day, use any relaxation techniques that you have practiced to help get your mind focused while you wait for the exam.

The most important study hour for your next exam attempt is the hour just after your failed attempt.

Prepare to fail before you take the exam. That is, prepare your schedule to give yourself an hour, or at least a half an hour, immediately after the exam attempt, in case you fail. Then follow these suggestions:

• Bring pen and paper, preferably a notebook you can write in if you have to write standing up or sitting somewhere inconvenient.

  Make sure you know where the pen and paper are so that you can take notes immediately after the exam. Keep them in your backpack if traveling by train or bus, or keep them on the car seat in your car.

• Install and practice with an audio recording app on your phone and be prepared to start talking into your app when you leave the testing center.

• Before the exam, scout the testing center, and plan the place where you will sit and take your notes, preferably somewhere quiet.

• Write down anything in particular that you can recall from any question.

• Write down details of questions you know you got right as well, because doing so may help trigger a memory of another question.

• Draw the figures that you can remember.

• Most importantly, write down any tidbit that might have confused you—terms, scenarios, anything.

• Take at least three passes at remembering. That is, you will hit a wall where you do not remember more. So, start on your way back to the next place, and then find a place to pause and take more notes. And do it again.

• When you have sucked your memory dry, take one more pass while thinking of the major topics in the book, to see if that triggers any other memory of a question.

Once this information is collected, you cannot share it with anyone, because doing so would break CompTIA’s nondisclosure agreement (NDA). CompTIA is serious about cheating, and they would consider the fact that you would share this kind of info publicly to be cheating. But you can use your information to study for your next attempt. Remember, anything that uncovers what you do not know related to the exam is valuable, so your notes will be very valuable to you. See the section “Study Suggestions after Failing to Pass” for the rest of the story.

A practice exam using the Pearson IT Certification Practice Test (PCPT) exam software lets you experience many of the same issues as when taking a real Cisco exam. The software gives you a number of questions, with a countdown timer shown in the window. After you answer a question, you cannot go back to it (yes, that’s true on Cisco exams). If you run out of time, the questions you did not answer count as incorrect.

The process of taking the timed practice exams helps you prepare in three key ways:

• To practice the exam event itself, including time pressure, the need to read carefully, with a need to concentrate for long periods

• To build your analysis and critical thinking skills when examining the IT scenarios built in to many questions

• To discover the gaps in your IT knowledge so that you can study those topics before the real exam

As much as possible, treat the practice exam events as if you were taking the real exam at a VUE testing center. The following list gives some advice on how to make your practice exam more meaningful, rather than just one more thing to do before exam day rolls around:

• Set aside two hours for taking the 75-minute timed practice exam.

• Make a list of what you expect to do for the ten minutes before the real exam event. Then visualize yourself doing those things. Before taking each practice exam, practice those final ten minutes before your exam timer starts. (The earlier section “Exam-Day Advice” lists some suggestions about what to do in those last ten minutes.)

• You cannot bring anything with you into the VUE exam room, so remove all notes and help materials from your work area before taking a practice exam. You can use blank paper, a pen, and your brain only. Do not use calculators, notes, web browsers, or any other app on your computer.

• Real life can get in the way, but if at all possible, ask anyone around you to leave you alone for the time you will practice. If you must do your practice exam in a distracting environment, wear headphones or earplugs to reduce distractions.

• Do not guess, hoping to improve your score. Answer only when you have confidence in the answer. Then, if you get the question wrong, you can go back and think more about the question in a later study session.

Interestingly, web browsers, and the content on those web pages, have trained us all to scan. Web page designers actually design content expecting certain scan patterns. Regardless of the pattern, when reading a web page, almost no one reads sequentially, and no one reads entire sentences. They scan for the interesting graphics and the big words, and then scan the space around those noticeable items.

Other parts of our electronic culture have also changed how the average person reads. For example, many of you grew up using texting and social media, sifting through hundreds or thousands of messages—but each message barely fills an entire sentence.

Those everyday habits have changed how we all read and think in front of a screen. Unfortunately, those same habits often hurt our scores when taking computer-based exams.

If you scan exam questions like you read web pages, texts, and tweets, you will probably make some mistakes because you missed a key fact in the question, answer, or exhibit. It helps to start at the beginning and read all the words—a process that is amazingly unnatural for many people today.

Concerning taking the practice exams, and answering individual questions, let me make two suggestions. First, before the practice exam, think about your own personal strategy for how you will read a question. Make your approach to multiple-choice questions be a conscious decision on your part. Second, if you want some suggestions on how to read an exam question, use the following strategy:

Step 1. Read the question itself, thoroughly, from start to finish.

Step 2. Scan any exhibit or figure.

Step 3. Scan the answers to look for the types of information. (Numeric? Terms? Single words? Phrases?)

Step 4. Reread the question thoroughly, from start to finish, to make sure you understand it.

Step 5. Read each answer thoroughly, while referring to the figure/exhibit as needed. After reading each answer, before reading the next answer:

A. If it’s correct, select it as correct.

B. If for sure it is incorrect, mentally rule it out.

C. If you’re unsure, mentally note it as a possible correct answer.

Use the practice exams as a place to practice your approach to reading. Every time you click to the next question, try to read the question following your approach. If you are feeling time pressure, that is the perfect time to keep practicing your approach, to reduce and eliminate questions you miss because of scanning the question instead of reading thoroughly.

First, study the notes you took about your failed attempt (see earlier section “Reserve the Hour after the Exam in Case You Fail”). Do not share that information with others, but use it to study. You should be able to answer every actual exam question you can remember, or at least understand everything you remember that confused you, before showing up for the next attempt. Even if you never see the exact same question again, you will get a good return for your effort.

Second, spend more time on activities that uncover your weaknesses. When doing that, you have to slow down and be more self-aware. For instance, answer practice questions in study mode, and do not guess. Do not click on to the next question, but pause and ask yourself if you are really sure about both the wrong and correct answers. If unsure, fantastic! You just discovered a topic to go back and dig in to learn it more deeply.

Third, think about your time spent on the exam. Did you run out of time? Go too fast? Too slow? If too slow, which topics took too much of your time? Then make a written plan as to how you will approach time on the next attempt, and how you will track time use. And if you ran out of time, practice for the things that slowed you down.

Lastly, change your mindset. Certification exams are not like high school or college exams where your failing grade matters. Instead, it is more like a major event on the road to completing an impressive major accomplishment, one that most people have to try a few times to achieve.

For instance, it is more like training to run a marathon in under four hours. The first time running a marathon, you may not even finish, or you may finish at 4:15 rather than under 4:00. But finishing a marathon in 4:15 is not a failure by any means. Or maybe it is more like training to complete an obstacle course (any Ninja Warrior fans out there? www.nbc.com/american-ninja-warrior). Maybe you got past the first three obstacles today, but you couldn’t climb over the 14-foot-high warped wall. That just means you need to practice on that wall a little more.

So change your mindset. You’re a marathon runner looking to improve your time, or a Ninja Warrior looking to complete the obstacle course. And you are getting better skills every time you study, which helps you compete in the market.

First, the “Review All Key Topics” sections give you some useful study tasks.

Second, use more exam questions from other sources. You can always get more questions in the Premium Edition eBook and Practice Test products, which include an eBook copy of this book plus additional questions in additional PCPT exam banks. However, you can search the Internet for questions from many sources, and review those questions as well.

Finally, join in the discussions on forums such as the CompTIA Certification Forums at https://www.certforums.com/forums/comptia-certification-forums/, COMPTIA at https://certcollection.org/forum/forum/21-comptia/, and others.

Try to answer questions asked by other learners; the process of answering makes you think much harder about the topic. When someone posts an answer with which you disagree, think about why and talk about it online. This is a great way to both learn more and build confidence.

I would encourage you to celebrate when you pass, and ask advice when you do not. I personally would love to hear about your progress through Twitter (@Sopertech) or my Facebook page (facebook.com/Sopertech). I wish you well, and congratulations for working through the entire book!