Took the LX0-103 on Wednesday and failed...

quickman007

After my 9th exam it finally happened, I failed. Got a 450 and needed 500 to pass. Probably 3 questions missed and I know which ones they were, too. Strangely enough it was actually a very easy exam. The fill in the blanks were simple and when I knew an answer, I really knew it. The issue was there were several questions I completely guessed. Some made no sense to me at all or were hardly mentioned in the material I used. I do know that I'm weak on RPM/YUM, dpkg/apt-get, and compression utilities. There were about 6 questions on those topics that I was unsure of, so I'm hoping that by studying them I'll be able to hit that 500. The biggest issue is that I'm afraid of failing again but I suppose that's just how the cookie crumbles.

For those curious, I used the WGU course material (the Sybex book) and the Linux+ OCG. I recommend them both, they each covered things that the other missed. If you don't slack off in any areas like I did, you can definitely pass. My Linux experience prior to studying was messing around with cd and ls on a VM at home for a night. I studied for about 4 weeks before attempting the exam.

It's all good, though. I was getting cocky anyways.

si20

Sorry to hear that you failed.

Based on my experience, i'd have to politely disagree that the exam is easy. I'd probably recommend doing much more than 4 weeks' worth of study too, because in some aspects, the LX0-104 continues on from the LX0-103 and if you've failed the LX0-103, you'd probably struggle with the 104. I've found that the course requires you to know how things work. e.g the boot process. It's not enough to know that Ubuntu or openSUSE start automatically, you need to go deeper and understand how the files in /etc/ work and the ramdisk and grub work.

If i'm honest, the Linux+ is an awful lot to remember - and I fell over at some of the 'switch' questions on the 103 myself despite a few months of studying on and off. In real life, you'd use the man page if you were struggling to remember - in the exam, you get faced with multiple choice and a couple of fill in the blanks. As someone told me when I did the OSCP, it's better to get the most you can out of the course rather than just get the cert. Good luck for the next exam!