I took the A+ core exam Friday and it proved to be a humiliating experience! I thought I new everything there could possibly be on that Test. I was wrong!
I read Mike Meyers AIO, twice. I studied Christopher Crayton's Testtaker's book and scored 100 on about 40 different practice exams. I took the Cert21 exam using all 261 questions and got 247 right on my first try. Most of the questions I got wrong were just stupid mistakes on my part, like, not making sure I clicked an answer on each question or not choosing 3 answers when it told me to. Actually, there only 2 questions on the Cert21 test I was unsure of. Add to all that the fact I have some experience inside a computer and I walked into the testing center with a load of confidence.
The result was a mediocre, at best, 738. There were probably 20 questions I never had anticipated running into on the core exam. There were questions about which lights would blink in varying situations on a DSL modem. There were actually different types of T1 lines they required the test taker to know the speeds of, and there was 1 totally incomprehensible question about hooking up 2 harddrives to one connection on an IDE cable! This question, I just couldn't deal with at all. On top of that, I know I missed the one about the speed of a serial port that has a 16650 Uart chip. My answer was 115Kbps. I was probably wrong but I would have known it 7 years ago. I probably got more answers wrong because my nerves had gotten the best of me and I lost all confidence after I had read some of these questions, about which I was clueless.
To turn humiliation into pure embarrassment my test result list 9 categories were I got "One or most questions wrong." Categories like "Identify environmental protection measures and procedures, and when/how to use them." This one probably pertains to the one about what is inside a CRT that makes it so we can't throw the old ones in the garbage like we did in the good old days. Man! I can't tell you how stupid the whole thing has made me feel!
I was going to take the OS in 2 weeks but I better rethink my timetable. I took an OS practice test and only got 96%. With that as a gauge, I'd probably score, like, 250 on the Comp test, if I took it tomorrow!
Maybe, I'm just blowing off steam, but, for those of you who haven't taken the test yet: let me tell you, that test is a lot harder than I thought it was going to be!
