Transcender vs Real exam

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Just wanted to know, for those that have experience in both. How close to the real thing are the transcender exams in terms of format and questions?

There are a few questions that completly throw me off in transcender and some the i dont even know and cant find an answer in the Mike Meyers book. (eg Max number of monitors Win2000 supports).

 

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i can't help you with the experience with the exams yet :P


Xp Can take 10 , so im guessing Win2k can also

 

They are quite similar, if you have been studying the Mike Meyers AIO you should know that the two exams for the A+ are multiple choice like the transcender practice exams.

Difficulty wise I would say they are quite similar too, I actually thought the practice exams in the MIke Meyers book were the hardest.

I don't know how many monitors one copy of Windows 2000 supports, porbably 2 but thats just a guess.

 

Guys,

The answer is 10 monitors but i wasnt really looking for an answer.

I just wanted to know difficulty and question format wise, whether the two are similar.

I mean, i am seeing questions in the transcender that you would not know the answer from studying the syllabus (i have the Mike Meyers book and the Sybex book). You would not even think to learn that sort of stuff without seeing the question and reading up on it.

For example, another question asks which version of windows is able to access up to 64GB of RAM.
The answers is the Data center version of Windows server 2003.

But this is something that no one studying the A+ would know since windows server 2003 isnt on the exam!

Its only after researching on the net that i found the answer, but it makes me wonder what else the exam can throw at us that we will not know because we haven't been told to study it.

 

I found the Transcenders slightly harder then the real thing for A+ in all honesty.

I found the Meyers AIO questions probably the most "similar feeling" if that makes any sense, and probably the best thing to measure against...

 

I can tell you pretty definitively, because I used to write for Transcender/Self Test. Keep in mind that my perspective comes from how things USED to be at Transcender prior to 2005, and may not reflect the manner in which NEW products are created there.

When I worked there, they offered a format that is similar to the live exam. The types of questions were similar. If they had long scenarios, we had long scenarios. If they had drag and drops, we had drag and drops. Additionally, we tried to offer questions that were at least AS difficult as the live exam.

As far as the question content is concerned... obviously, the questions weren't the same, but the general concepts were the same. They're certainly not the same questions with a word or two changed, I can promise you that! But if you read through ALL of the questions and explanations, theoretically, you should have enough information to be able to do well on the exam.

Again, I'm not sure how they do it nowadays at Transcender/Self Test... but that's how we did it in the past, and how we currently do it at Boson.

To be honest, I don't know of ANY legitimate training product - book, practice exam, video-based training, or classroom-based training - that is going to hit EVERY single thing you could possibly be asked on the exam. But with the good products and classes, you will learn enough to pass with a reasonable cushion to spare.

 

I'd agree with nXPLOSi, the transcender exams I've always thought have been tougher than the actual exam. For the A+ anyway, they did seem to cover areas which I was not aware of.

 

The toughest questions I found were in the Exam Cram book (by Brooks IIRC). In my experience, these were clearly harder than the exam itself.

As for Transcender... Looking at the objectives, I'd say Server 2003 clearly is not on the exam. When the objectives talk about OS, the specifically say (in 3.0) that OS means Windows 2K, XP Pro/Home or MCE. An objective in 3.1 mentions comparing Windows, Mac OS and Linux, and 3.2 says that 95 (IIRC) and NT are fair game for upgrade questions. But there's no mention of Server versions. This is certainly not something I studied.

Based on the objectives, I don't see how CompTIA could justify Server 2003 specific questions - it's just not on the objectives. I'd say this is a case of Transcender being over-cautious. But isn't that a good thing, anyway? You can't fail for knowing too much! And almost anything you learn that you don't need for the exam, you may well need in real life one day.*
So you're not losing anything.


* Well... okay, the 10 monitors thing is pretty useless.

 

Ditto - i found the network+ from transcender harder than the exam

 

What, you don't have a 10-monitor setup?

 

My boss used to work with a guy who had 6 19" CRTs strapped together on his desk, thats what I call a hard core dev environment.