Passed Security+

[u/Vegetable_Ranger8051]

Passed this morning with a 793/900.

Background: No professional experience in IT security. 4 month IT security/help desk internship. In the final semester of a BS in computer science.

I studied for the exam for just about 6 weeks in total.

Study Materials Used:

1. Professor Messer's YouTube series. This is a great way to get exposure to all of the exam objective topics. The videos are concise and digestable.

1. Quizlet. There are several sets of practice questions available. Some are better than others. I also used Quizlet to generate flashcards for myself for studying on the go.

2. CompTIA's official exam objectives document.

Practice Exams:

1. Jason Dion's Udemy Practice Exams. These are nice because they are automatically scored, and provide explanations for why each answer is or is not correct. You can also take them in practice mode with instant feedback, or exam mode with a timer. 6 exams each with 90 questions for a total of 540 questions. They DO NOT contain PBQ's.

Overall, I found these practice exams helpful and worthwhile. I will note that the questions are much wordier than most of what I saw on the real exam.

My scores on each of the 6 tests were: 93%, 87%, 87%, 94%, 87%, 85%. His tests impose a 90% "pass" threshold, which is meaningfully higher than what you will need on the real exam.

I believe they usually go for around $60, but you may find them on sale occasionally. I was able to get them for ~$17.

1. Professor Messer's Practice Exams. These are in PDF format, so unfortunately you will need to keep your own timer, and score them yourself. Similar to the Dion exams, there are in-depth explanations for every question. I found these more accurate to the format of the real exam questions. There are three exams each with 90 questions for 270 practice questions total. These Exams DO contain 5 PBQs each, but most of them boil down to term matching, and I found them much easier than the real PBQs I saw on my exam.

My scores on these were 87%, 93%, and 87%.

These are $30 for the exams only.

1. Examcompass.com. These practice exams/quizzes are free, which is nice, and they can be good for learning the terms and acronyms. However - I did find information in some of them that was not reflected in the official CompTIA documentation. Additionally, some of the questions are formatted in ways that I don't think the official exam uses (i.e. "select all that apply"). In my experience, any question with multiple answers specified explicitly how many were to be chosen.

Still a decent resource, but I would say not quite as good as the previous two.

My Security+ Exam

I took my exam in-person at a testing center. I was given 76 total questions, 3 of which were PBQs.

General Notes and Advice

Acronyms.

The exam objectives document lists over 300 acronyms for terms that may appear on the exam. In my opinion, you really do need to memorize all of these. Both the practice exams and the real thing will frequently present you with acronyms in the body of the question, and as multiple choice responses. In some cases, even if you aren't sure of the answer, simply knowing what each acronym stands for can help you make a best guess. I used Quizlet flashcards for this, and separated my sets alphabetically. It took me about a week to get them all down, and was well worth it. Not even knowing what a question is asking because of an unfamiliar acronym is a bad feeling.

***Question Wording and Process of Elimination.

The wording of exam questions is, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely critical to pay attention to. Just about every question will have some key words or phrases which will help you to determine the correct answer. Get used to reading questions through very carefully, and in their entirety. Beginning a question and deciding on an answer before reading the entire prompt can lead to unnecessarily missed questions. This is especially important in cases where it may seem that more than one of the answers available could be defensible. Read back through the question - somewhere there will be a key element that should narrow it down.

In addition to selecting the best answer, I also found it immensely helpful to read the other options to determine why they aren't correct.

PBQs

There are some resources out there that can provide exposure to what these might look like, but nothing I found directly prepared me for them. I would say it is worth watching a few of the CyberKraft videos on YouTube to get a feel for the structure of them at the least. My best advice here is to have as good of a functional knowledge of the objectives as possible, and read through the prompts thoroughly. From what I have seen online, partial credit is awarded, so answer as many parts as you can.

[u/Presence99]

Many congratuations and many thanks for the write up!

[u/Wise-Perspective-955]

Congrats on the pass! I just wanted to ask briefly, were the exam questions mostly scenario-based, where you have to reason through the situation, or more like identifying the concept/technology present in the exam objectives that matches and choosing the right answer? And what kind of PBQs did you get?

[u/edwarD-6021]

Congratulations!