Recently A+ certified, my observations

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I took the "Essentials" exam a week ago, and just to be awkward I chose the "Depot Technician" exam as my elective and passed that Friday. I figured a more hardware orientated A+ may compliment my MCDST more. BTW, this was the fourth test I took with Prometric when I sat alone and totally undisturbed in the examination room - is this normally the case?

The CBT I used from Career Academy was excellent, much better than the one they sent me for the MCDST which was only on 3 DVDs as opposed to 6 for the A+ (I was lucky if there was ever 1 GB of material on them though). As the CBT was so good, and my head was swimming with the MCDST stuff from last month, I didn't feel the need to use the Meyers book which came free as a bonus with the CBT. The Measure-Ups also boosted my confidence as my scores were high from the start. I'm almost tempted to suggest that someone with a few years IT experience under their belt could just sit the exams without preparation, but there was still a few tidbits I did pick-up even after just completing the MCDST and nine years working in an IT environment.

I thought the CompTIA questioning style was interesting when compared to that used by Microsoft. They are generally, simple one sentence questions, although the answers aren't quite as intelligently thought out as Microsoft's. The two obviously wrong answers are usually just plain daft, and the two more likely answers can (sometimes) seem to be just as worthy to be right as the other. Sometimes, the answer you know they want you to pick, and is in fact the correct (point scoring) answer, is in my opinion - wrong. It's difficult to give an example without specifying an actual question, so I won't try. Whatever, I never found myself disagreeing with any of the answers from the Microsoft exams.

I spent an hour today trying to add my new CompTIA logo into my CV - it doesn't seem to go very well with the Microsoft one. More work required.

My next one will be a toughie; ITIL v.3 Foundation. I've got the exam this Friday with just one week to study - another CBT from Career Academy. I'll let you all know how I get on.

 

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Welcome and congrats!

Depends on the testing center, but that's the case where I am probably a little more than half of the times I've tested.

That's because CompTIA has people creating questions who are wholly unqualified to be creating questions. Eh, you get used to it... and it's usually not bad enough to fail an exam over. But still... it looks unprofessional, as you've noticed.