Additional Resources

[Chris Posey]

When students reach out and ask me for additional training materials, we often share Jason Dion in Udemy and Mike Meyers. Does anyone else have a go-to training program that they share that doesn't go against CompTIA guidelines?

 

[Rick Butler]

When students reach out and ask me for additional training materials, we often share Jason Dion in Udemy and Mike Meyers. Does anyone else have a go-to training program that they share that doesn't go against CompTIA guidelines?

Well, we usually don't advocate for one or another provider's materials apart from CompTIA here on CIN; I personally think they all have their strengths and weaknesses. I've used Cybrary before, books from Cengage, Pearson, Sybex, and McGraw Hill, even as secondary/auxiliary. Dion, Myers, and Messer have track records of preparing students successfully. Thing is, I have never advocated that a serious student constrain themselves to any one provider - always have two sources of reference before going into the practice phase.

That being said, are you using CompTIA or TestOut materials now? I think in the last five years, they've improved quite a bit. CertMaster 1.0 - well.... CertMaster now, very good. And I think the whole of CIN is waiting to see what the "unified product" will look like, when they finally blend up CertMaster and TestOut.

The hardest challenge in this arena in my experience has always been with practice testing. I've written on this topic a number of times here on CIN, but the hardest thing about practice testing is building that confidence up - that if a student is getting 80, 90, or 100s on the practice tests that they would be "ready" to take the live exam. That is a very tough thing to achieve, and yet, when dealing with students where the overall goal is "to pass the cert", well, that's where the pressure is.

/r

 

[Chris Posey]

Well, we usually don't advocate for one or another provider's materials apart from CompTIA here on CIN; I personally think they all have their strengths and weaknesses. I've used Cybrary before, books from Cengage, Pearson, Sybex, and McGraw Hill, even as secondary/auxiliary. Dion, Myers, and Messer have track records of preparing students successfully. Thing is, I have never advocated that a serious student constrain themselves to any one provider - always have two sources of reference before going into the practice phase.

That being said, are you using CompTIA or TestOut materials now? I think in the last five years, they've improved quite a bit. CertMaster 1.0 - well.... CertMaster now, very good. And I think the whole of CIN is waiting to see what the "unified product" will look like, when they finally blend up CertMaster and TestOut.

The hardest challenge in this arena in my experience has always been with practice testing. I've written on this topic a number of times here on CIN, but the hardest thing about practice testing is building that confidence up - that if a student is getting 80, 90, or 100s on the practice tests that they would be "ready" to take the live exam. That is a very tough thing to achieve, and yet, when dealing with students where the overall goal is "to pass the cert", well, that's where the pressure is.

/r

Thanks, Rick for the insights. Our students are using CompTIA CertMaster Learn and Practice and we have found they are struggling more and more with the PBQs. Some of our instructors have even mentioned the PBQs are not similar to those of the actual exam. We have used some of the other resources you listed and they have been great for those basic questions to help students prepare. Always looking for new and credible resources to share. Thanks again.

 

[Gregory Childers]

When students reach out and ask me for additional training materials, we often share Jason Dion in Udemy and Mike Meyers. Does anyone else have a go-to training program that they share that doesn't go against CompTIA guidelines?

I stopped recommending Dion, Messer, and Udemy.

I had a free subscription to Udemy at a previous company, and I canceled my account because I couldn't find any quality content.

Dion posts CompTIA questions of the day on LinkedIn. It's frustrating how many times he has incorrect answers or references to deprecated standards.

Messer just re-records his stuff every time a new version of an exam is released but pretends that the new exam is 50%+ different than the previous exam. I've passed more CompTIA exams than he has and I can assure you that is completely false. It's closer to 10%-15% new material.

My recommendation to students who ask for additional resources is to target individual topics that challenge them. Watch a video on subnetting, zero trust, or SNMP. Don't use multiple resources that cover all the exam objectives when you already have one that does that.

 

[Rick Butler]

Thanks, Rick for the insights. Our students are using CompTIA CertMaster Learn and Practice and we have found they are struggling more and more with the PBQs. Some of our instructors have even mentioned the PBQs are not similar to those of the actual exam.

So, this is exactly my point. Review questions coming out of CMLearn are not going to be certification grade - because the student is learning the material. Even the final exams that you see are not going to be to that level. CertMaster Practice questions, I've found, sometimes are certification grade, sometimes they're not.

Now, I've said this before out here on CIN, but let me restate - there are two uses for practice tests:

1. Sharpening - In this mode, the student goes through questions, being made aware of the things they didn't know. This is where students usually find themselves because they want to get that improvement from 60 to 70 to 80 and so on. But the cost is high - each question revealed and answered diminishes its utility. Getting a 100 is not overly difficult for someone with a good memory, but that doesn't directly say that learner will get that high a score, or even a passing one, on the live exam.
   
   
2. Validating - In this, answers to fresh questions are never revealed. This would more closely model the certification exam. The benefit is that you can replay the questions and, for the most part, be able to measure improvement. The detractor is that a student doesn't get much feedback on the specific topics that require remediation. In this case, they would know how well they did in each domain objective, but not the specific learning points.

Remember, the subtle difference in all of this - are you training students to pass the exam or perform on the job? Sure, we'd LOVE both, but I have seen many training houses that are more diploma mill types - pay money, get the info to pass the exam as their ONLY focus. Sure they get defensive when challenged on it, but it's all too prevalent. I would impress upon your students to "seek to know", not "seek to pass".

PBQ's are really another way to see a question's content. Rather than 'multiple-guess', it's either matching or fill in the blank. There are some PBQs that are very good at helping students think through a problem. We've even had entire TTT sessions where, for two hours, the attendees focused on 1-2 questions. But I have never yet seen the content from a PBQ on a live cert exam - and that's quite okay. If you use the PBQ as a training tool, it will help more in my experience.

One other thing that often gets overlooked with practice testing, particularly in instructor-led scenarios is "the answer is A, but why not B, C, or D?" Many times, there is some really good enriching training when we ask questions like, "Okay, the answer is Platform-as-a-Service, but why not "Software-as-a-Service" or "Infrastructure-as-a-Service"?

That is one thing I found on Microsoft Learn that is helpful - the explanations to questions will say why a question is NOT the answer.

Finally, any old salt out here on CIN will tell you, the industry is replete with "paper certs" who pulled up brain dumps or dumped info on Quizlet.

/r

 

[jarrelrivera]

So, this is exactly my point. Review questions coming out of CMLearn are not going to be certification grade - because the student is learning the material. Even the final exams that you see are not going to be to that level. CertMaster Practice questions, I've found, sometimes are certification grade, sometimes they're not.

Now, I've said this before out here on CIN, but let me restate - there are two uses for practice tests:

1. Sharpening - In this mode, the student goes through questions, being made aware of the things they didn't know. This is where students usually find themselves because they want to get that improvement from 60 to 70 to 80 and so on. But the cost is high - each question revealed and answered diminishes its utility. Getting a 100 is not overly difficult for someone with a good memory, but that doesn't directly say that learner will get that high a score, or even a passing one, on the live exam.
   
   
2. Validating - In this, answers to fresh questions are never revealed. This would more closely model the certification exam. The benefit is that you can replay the questions and, for the most part, be able to measure improvement. The detractor is that a student doesn't get much feedback on the specific topics that require remediation. In this case, they would know how well they did in each domain objective, but not the specific learning points.

Remember, the subtle difference in all of this - are you training students to pass the exam or perform on the job? Sure, we'd LOVE both, but I have seen many training houses that are more diploma mill types - pay money, get the info to pass the exam as their ONLY focus. Sure they get defensive when challenged on it, but it's all too prevalent. I would impress upon your students to "seek to know", not "seek to pass".

PBQ's are really another way to see a question's content. Rather than 'multiple-guess', it's either matching or fill in the blank. There are some PBQs that are very good at helping students think through a problem. We've even had entire TTT sessions where, for two hours, the attendees focused on 1-2 questions. But I have never yet seen the content from a PBQ on a live cert exam - and that's quite okay. If you use the PBQ as a training tool, it will help more in my experience.

One other thing that often gets overlooked with practice testing, particularly in instructor-led scenarios is "the answer is A, but why not B, C, or D?" Many times, there is some really good enriching training when we ask questions like, "Okay, the answer is Platform-as-a-Service, but why not "Software-as-a-Service" or "Infrastructure-as-a-Service"?

That is one thing I found on Microsoft Learn that is helpful - the explanations to questions will say why a question is NOT the answer.

Finally, any old salt out here on CIN will tell you, the industry is replete with "paper certs" who pulled up brain dumps or dumped info on Quizlet.

/r

I've bookmarked this.

I echo Rick's comment above.
but I'll also add, try using AI perhaps?

 

[Edna Chimpeni]

So, this is exactly my point. Review questions coming out of CMLearn are not going to be certification grade - because the student is learning the material. Even the final exams that you see are not going to be to that level. CertMaster Practice questions, I've found, sometimes are certification grade, sometimes they're not.

Now, I've said this before out here on CIN, but let me restate - there are two uses for practice tests:

1. Sharpening - In this mode, the student goes through questions, being made aware of the things they didn't know. This is where students usually find themselves because they want to get that improvement from 60 to 70 to 80 and so on. But the cost is high - each question revealed and answered diminishes its utility. Getting a 100 is not overly difficult for someone with a good memory, but that doesn't directly say that learner will get that high a score, or even a passing one, on the live exam.
   
   
2. Validating - In this, answers to fresh questions are never revealed. This would more closely model the certification exam. The benefit is that you can replay the questions and, for the most part, be able to measure improvement. The detractor is that a student doesn't get much feedback on the specific topics that require remediation. In this case, they would know how well they did in each domain objective, but not the specific learning points.

Remember, the subtle difference in all of this - are you training students to pass the exam or perform on the job? Sure, we'd LOVE both, but I have seen many training houses that are more diploma mill types - pay money, get the info to pass the exam as their ONLY focus. Sure they get defensive when challenged on it, but it's all too prevalent. I would impress upon your students to "seek to know", not "seek to pass".

PBQ's are really another way to see a question's content. Rather than 'multiple-guess', it's either matching or fill in the blank. There are some PBQs that are very good at helping students think through a problem. We've even had entire TTT sessions where, for two hours, the attendees focused on 1-2 questions. But I have never yet seen the content from a PBQ on a live cert exam - and that's quite okay. If you use the PBQ as a training tool, it will help more in my experience.

One other thing that often gets overlooked with practice testing, particularly in instructor-led scenarios is "the answer is A, but why not B, C, or D?" Many times, there is some really good enriching training when we ask questions like, "Okay, the answer is Platform-as-a-Service, but why not "Software-as-a-Service" or "Infrastructure-as-a-Service"?

That is one thing I found on Microsoft Learn that is helpful - the explanations to questions will say why a question is NOT the answer.

Finally, any old salt out here on CIN will tell you, the industry is replete with "paper certs" who pulled up brain dumps or dumped info on Quizlet.

/r

Good methodology to pass!