Passed th Exam!

bugzy3188

Hey all!

Just passed the SY0-401 exam yesterday! Woot! Passed with a 796, not great but a pass none the less. I must say that I am none too thrilled with the way that these questions are worded/put together, many of the questions were just unnecessarily confusing and some I am sure had more than one correct answer leaving me guessing what it is that CompTIA wants to see, over all a very frustrating exam. I am not saying that I couldn't have made improvements by studying harder myself, but those are my opinions on the exam.

Some areas where I struggled were:

Cryptography: I have a fairly decent understanding of hashing and encryption including the various methods used and the purposes of each, but I did have to take educated guesses on a few questions because I couldn't remember finite details. Memorize all of the key and block sizes, memorize which encryption/hash methods use which algorithms and the differences between all of them, minute and otherwise

Documentation: This was always a weak point for me, I have just found it to be so dry and uninteresting that it is hard to motivate myself to really learn/rememver it. I did get caught up on a few questions pertaining to various risk assessment as well as the various partnership documents (SLA, BPO, etc.). It's not that I skipped these items when studying, but my brain just struggled to retain this information.

Overall I was really second guessing myself during this exam, I felt like I had a pretty good grasp on the concepts but they really are out to throw you for a loop on this one. My advice would be to go in to it with the intent of thinking very much inside the box pertaining to what you studied. I found myself creating scenarios in my head where certain answers could be considered correct when in fact they were likely looking for the obvious answer. If you find yourself questioning which answer to choose and all else fails, just go back through terminology in your head and try to find the answer that correlates the most with what you have read.

cyberguypr

Congrats on the pass!