Nearly ruined it for myself! I was convinced my exam was at 2pm today, so I showed up at 1:15, had a drink and review my notes. Went to the proctor at 1:45 and she immediately gave me an annoyed “be on time next time”. Not knowing at the time that I was late, I have to admit I let it get to me, I’m pretty sensitive. I spent the entire exam being annoyed and wanting to get out of there. It was only after I was in the bathroom an hour later that I realized that I was lucky to be allowed to take the exam at all. I was even thinking of going to apologize to her, but I wasn’t rude to her or anything.

With that out of the way, I passed with a 761/900. No, I don’t like my score, but I went into this exam with a terrible attitude (which honestly started way before exam day because I’m feeling burned out from studying). I raced through all the questions in 25 minutes and had to force myself to review for another 20.

It felt easier than Net+, there are more questions that are straight to the point. Still, quite a few tripped me up. Can’t quite figure out when compTIA wants me to consider FDE or remote wipe. I’m thinking, remote wipe is only good as long as the device remains online. But I digress, I passed, I’m happy, I wanna move on.

Here are my study methods:

• CompTIA Security+ Study Guide with over 500 practice test questions These practice questions are good! Sometimes their website doesn’t work so I’ve done the chapter practice questions and the two full practice exams on my phone. My scores for the full practice exams were: 98% and 84%.

• Professor Messer’s Security+ 701 course and study sessions Can never go wrong with the Professor. Unfortunately I couldn’t afford his practice questions this time around.

• Jason Dion’s practice questions set one. I didn’t like these questions. There were a lot of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors which resulted in making the questions harder than they were, because what are you even saying? My scores were: 76%, 77%, 82%, 76%, 81% and 72%. I didn’t make these questions the focus of my study.

• Also didn’t really focus on examcompass much this time around, I took tests on exam day and scored 76% for test 3 and 60% on test 19. Please note that I didn’t take the percentage based on points, but the (lower) percentage based on questions that I answered correctly.

Just wanted to do another quick shoutout to Andrew Ramdayal, his “50 practice questions” video gave me the confidence I had enough knowledge to pass.

Shoutout number two goes out to Pete Zerger, his Security+ exam cram videos are absolutely fantastic. I learned some new things a day before the exam. His videos are not fully uploaded yet, but if you need a quick review, you can check out the completed modules. If you need to review a short topic, the completed modules are also available in smaller videos.

Okay, that’s the trifecta over and done with. From start to finish that took me a little less than five months. Though, I’m not done with compTIA just yet, I like this structured way of learning. I have to do Linux+ sometime this year and I’m definitely interested in moving forward with what I’ve learned so far.