I passed both the Core Hardware & OS Technologies Exams.
I had a few things I wanted to say that might help others studying for the A+ exams.
My biggest piece of advice for both exams is this:
If you don't know an answer right off the top of your head, most of the questions are designed so that you can easily determine a correct answer by applying what you know to eliminating the other possible answers. In most every case you can eliminate 1 or 2 possible choices right away.
Secondly.. if you do know an answer off the top of your head, still take the time to think about it and confirm that you are not being too hasty in your response. Some questions are kind of tricky that way.
And remember... every exam is different!
Core Hardware Exam (220-301)
Basically this exam was more straight forward. There wasn't much on the exam that you couldn't get from a good book on the subject. It all comes down to knowing your hardware stuff from memory and you don't necessarily have to be a computer tech repairing computers every day to pass the exam. In fact, if you were a computer tech, depending on the nature of the group of computers you service, I would caution against just going straight into the exam and hoping to do well based on experience alone. It is a very broad exam and if you are 'book knowledge' weak in one area, such as networking, then it will show in your final score.
OS Technologies Exam (220-302)
This exam is a different beast from the other. I found that many of the questions, maybe a quarter or third, were designed to seperate those who have 'book knowledge' from those who have actual hands on experience. I ran into many questions that tested not just your understanding of what things were or how they worked but also very detailed functionings, commands, etc. I highly recommend setting up a lab for yourself and actually testing every feature of every operating system from DOS-XP (with less attention to 3x of course).
In addition I would say that half the questions (maybe more) asked for 2 or 3 answers. Example: they might ask you to check off three different ways to access a particular program. Also, instead of asking you directly about some feature or limitation of something they tend to give you 'what if' scenarios designed to figure out if you completely understand how something works, sometimes without even giving many clues as to what it is you are being tested on. There are some tricky questions on this exam!
In my exam I hit a good 20-25 very tough (obscure) questions right away. Then the rest were a good mix of super easy questions and ones I had to think about but weren't hard to figure out. When I pressed the button to end this one I was sure I had answered at least 3/4 or more of the questions correctly. Yet I didn't actually pass by much (54
. I suspect the tougher questions are weighted heavily and the easy questions weighted very very lightly.
A little backbround on my situation might help you judge your own preparedness.
I have been working with computers for over 10 years... since the days when buying a new PC game or program often meant a hardware upgrade and at the very least making up a special set of boot disks to tweak your config.sys and autoexec.bat to run the application properly.
I have two years of full time computer science studies under my belt and have done about 6 months of tech support work although most of my work involves using computers (programming etc) as opposed to troubleshooting them.
I studied a book that was published in 2001 for the 2001 objectives and updated with some XP stuff in 2002. Ideally I recommend getting a book designed for the 2003 objectives. I also only studied lightly for a few weeks before each exam and had maybe one full day of solid study for each exam. Propbably not enough, although I already had a good foundation of knowledge from my academic studies.
My exam results were 562 (220-301) & 548 (220-302).
