I just barely passed the Network+

Hi all. I'm new here. This site looks great and wished I found it sooner.

I just took my Network+ exam on 2/29/08 and barely passed with a 562. Not very proud of the score. But I am troubled by the whole thing even though I passed.

I never new that the exam changed from 2005 to 2007 edition. All my materials that I had were for the 2005 exam and nowhere did anything state this exam changed. For instance, my material never covered anything regarding Mac OS X server. And I would say that just a little under half my test was based on Mac OS X questions. I think my saving bacon was the Novell questions and 802.xx questions. Not one question was asked about the normal stuff like port numbers, cable standards, OSI layer. There were a few questions on routers, switches and such. Why would anyone need to know so much on Mac OS X server? Am I the only one who got a boat-load of questions on that?

I was passing practice exam after exam for the past month and felt comfortable going in. Once I sat down and the very first question was Mac OS X, I knew something wasn't right. And then it just continued to get worse. There were a number of scenario questions that I had not seen in my study material either.

There were 4 of us taking this exam in my department and I am the only one who passed. Our company only gave us two months to study and were not willing to buy any study material. So we got what we could and shared the books. At least they paid for the exams.

Why didn't CompTIA notify anyone of this? Their own site still shows the old 2005 objectives. The test center that I took it at were not aware of the change until they looked into it. And what about study guides that reflect this? Supposedly, ExamCram 2 has been updated to reflect alot of the newer questions. I didn't find this until today on InformIT's website:

http://www.informit.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0789733528

I don't mean to sound like a whiner, but it just didn't seem like we could find the proper material to study for this exam.

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Comments

ULWiz

This is a very neutral exam where as cisco and microsoft are vendor based exams. The exam has not changed and its still N10-003. Yes there a Novell And Mac OS questions because they are still around. It was covered a decent amount in my book but not enough.

As long as you passed thats all that matters.

Congrats

Daniel333

Network+ is very esoteric, I too ran into considerable Apple and Novell on my 2005 exam. None of it was covered by my material.

lnsomnia

I asked CompTIA about that very some confusing thing for the test, when I finished the exam it said 2007 Edition, but when I went to my CompTIA login and looked to see what I passed, it said 2005. Another even more confusing thing was when I had my certification kit sent, it said 2002. Basically the answer they gave me was it was based on the 2005 fundamentals but they change the test name every year to match the year. Looks like they haven't updated it to 2008 yet.

As for your test score, don't worry about it, as long as you passed. Look at me, I got a 620 on my Network+ but I aced my CCNA 1000/1000. I felt there was more that needed to be covered in the Network+ than the CCNA. I also felt going into the Network+ exam that I knew most of the fundamental networking questions, apparently I was wrong :P

I studied for my Network+ for about a month, 5 days a week for 2 hours a day. For my CCNA I was studying 4 hours a night and up to 8 hours a day on the weekends. I wanted to make sure I knew the material. It just goes to show the more you study the better grasp you'll have on the subject.