Obligatory I passed the 220-901 Exam Post ((804) + 902 Question +Tips
I've been studying for the A+ for about a month and a half. I was planning to get the trifecta finished before school started back up again in late August to help land an internship next summer (In InfoSec or Network Engineering). At the bare minimum, I was planning on Network+ by the end of summer, and I figured by now I'd be almost ready to take the 902, but you know life happens.
I put my 902 question at the bottom because I figure people are like me checking the sub daily for any study tips/prep material reviews they can get.
My background: I'm a Senior in a Computer Science program, 25-30 years old. I have no professional IT experience, but I have been obsessed with computers for as long as I can remember. Even learning HTML in the 90s to publish a DBZ fan website(lol). I have built, maintained, and upgraded my own computers for about 15 years now. The most intensive repair I have done was replacing my old laptop's LCD screen about 5 years ago (I wish I knew about those dang WiFi antennas back then) and later replacing the DC jack.
I have my own homelab with 2 servers, a Cisco switch, and I just added a pfSense router this week that is running on a Lenovo SFF computer.
Prep Material Used: I decided to start out with Pluralsight's A+ Course because I had a free trial from being a student.
The content was good and the modules were set up so each one corresponded with a specific exam objective. At the end of each module, he assigns homework which I actually liked. It ranged from reading your desktop computer's motherboard manual to figure out what the maximum RAM upgrade you could install in it and then go price it, to analyzing WiFi networks around your home and seeing how you can optimize your wireless network by changing the channel.
They also list related Pluralsight courses at the end of each module and for most people, I think going through those is overkill, but if you have a limited computing background or are extremely weak in one subject then it would help.
The modules are divided up into 4 courses, each one covering one of the broad exam objectives. They have 10 question practice quizzes for each course. The questions themselves are good to take after you finish each course but are not as challenging as the real Exam or some of the practice Exams I took and after taking it 4-5 times you start to get the mostly the same questions.
Pluralsight Trials: There are two that you can get with an EDU email, VisualStudio will automatically create a Pluralsight account for you. Microsoft Dreamspark(Imagine) will give you a key that you can redeem, but for some reason, you can only use the key when creating a new account, not an existing account. I contacted their support email about this and they couldn't tell me why it was set up this way.
Link to redeem the Pluralsight Trial Code
After finishing the Pluralsight courses I started to watch Professor Messer's videos on 1.5 speed and sometimes only paying half attention to them. I kind of wish I had done 1.25x and paid more attention to them, but at this point, I was so bored with some concepts(mostly Objective 1 stuff I knew before deciding to take the A+) that I just wanted to rush through it and get the exam over with.
I'm glad I used u/professormesser videos and Pluralsight because on some things it did help having two points of view and some things 1 covered but the other didn't. The only thing I can think of off of the top of my head is Professor Messer mentioned TRRS where as Pluralsight only mentioned TRS.
Studying: My friend who has his A+ gave me Professor Messer's course notes, but they were so invaluable I would have bought them had he not.
I also used the set of 1500 Anki flash cards that are pinned in the CompTIA Discord chat. I tried searching the subreddit for the creator, I think it's u/hhhax7 if it is let me know so I can give you credit.
I also used the A+ Acronyms Anki flash cards that u/Stiverton made. Again a set I wish I had started using much earlier.
I made my own flashcards with gFlash+ it's a simple app I've been using for a few years. I like it because you can easily make a flash card set using just a 2 column GoogleDocs Spreadsheet. I used it mainly to study things I was having a hard time remembering that Anki didn't cover often enough because the flashcard sets are so huge.
Be careful with other people's flash card sets, and confirm every flash card you think may be incorrect. I've seen a few that had one word wrong. The one I can remember is
"What is one disadvantage of GPT?"
"GPT cannot support hard drives larger than 2.2 TB"
And it should be "can support hard drives larger than 2.2 TB"
Practice Exams: I used all of the free practice exams, bought Professor Messer's A+ practice questions PDF, took all of Professor Messer's daily A+ pop quizzes as they came out for the last month, and went through and watched 4 most recent Professor Messer A+ study groups.
ExamCompass' tests are way harder than you will actually see on the exams, but take them anyway because I guarantee you will learn something new that could somehow help you. I found their best test was the 110 question 901 Acronyms Quiz.
CrucialExams and GoCertify were more like what you would see on the exam and almost on par with Professor Messer's questions. I went through all of the Professor Messer questions and graded myself at the end and reviewed what areas I was bad in to focus my study habits on. His exams were the closest to the exam questions, but maybe not as specific as the exam questions. The exam questions would mostly throw 3-4 symptoms at me for troubleshooting where as maybe his questions mostly would have only thrown 1 or 2.
The Day of: Get there early especially if this is your first time at the testing center. I did not follow this advice because I kept studying and watching videos. My GPS I thought was telling me to turn into the parking lot but actually took me into a neighborhood and told me my destination was the wall dividing the neighborhood from the parking lot. I made it in there on time with no time to quickly study in my car (not that it mattered I accidentally left my Professor Messer printouts at home).
Read the exam agreement before you go to the testing center because if you have test anxiety or are almost late like I was you can quickly skim the agreement and use the remaining time to take some deep breaths and calm your nerves.
The Exam: The exam was much harder than I anticipated. Against Professor Messer's study tips I actually did the Performance Based Questions first but flagged them for later review. Answer every question on your first pass through even if you think you are wrong, that way you can flag them and not have to worry about answering questions as fast as possible with only 5 minutes on the clock.
I actually thought I had failed the exam because on my first pass through I must have flagged more than half of the questions and only on my 3rd pass through of my flagged questions did I finally have none flagged, but that was mainly a "well I don't have much time left and probably won't get this one if I haven't by now" mentality because I still had other questions to review. Once I had no more questions flagged I had 9 minutes left and was able to quickly check all of the questions, mainly checking the non-flagged ones just in case.
As far as pin counts go I had questions about cable pin counts, but no RAM or CPU pin count questions.
I had a few printer questions, but not as much as other people have had.
On the troubleshooting questions read everything slowly and ask yourself if this makes sense. Like if you have made it past POST and get a blue screen in Windows maybe it's a driver error rather than bad/underpowered hardware.
The best advice I think I saw in a Professor Messer Study Group video was using the process of elimination on choices, if you know that some answer choices are not related at all to the question you can eliminate them and usually get down to only 2 options to pick from. There were only a few where I was able to eliminate all the choices except the correct answer.
The craziest question I had that I don't think anyone would get unless they have a solid grasp of the Theory and Math behind Computer Networks was on the actual workings of ECC RAM. I wish I could say more, but it was a short question and any more info I give on it would easily give away the question. I was blown away that they would ask it since I hadn't seen it covered anywhere. I only got it right because of a Computer Networks class I took last year.
I started to stress out over the acronyms a week ago after printing out the exam objectives and realizing most of them I had never seen before, but for the most part reviewing the acronyms didn't really help me much because they never came up in questions on the exams.
After: Pat yourself on the back and reward yourself with a nice stiff glass of the vice of your choice you deserve it. For the guy who posted this advice a few weeks ago and myself, it's a nice bourbon. Also, make a post and share your methods with other people, all of the "I passed the 901" posts where people detail their methods helped me out a lot.
Question: I was mainly taking the A+ to help prepare me for Network+, but also as a backup plan in case I can't land an internship next summer and need to take a Help Desk job after I graduate. Since it is so late in the summer I am thinking of studying for the Network+ next because I think it will look better for the internships I'll be applying for than the A+ would. My question for anyone who is both A+ and Network+ certified: how much overlap does the 902 have with Network+? Aside from objective 4.2(command line tools), it doesn't seem like it would have as much overlap as the 901 did. If that is the case I'm probably going to study for the Network+ next and slowly work on the 902 during the fall semester and study for Security+ in the Spring to take it before CompTIA retires the 401 in July 2018.
Edit: Formatting
Edit2: Words
Posted Jul 21, 2017, 10:04 PM UTC · edited