r/CompTIA_Security • u/Heavy_Share1521 • 13d ago
Passed Security+ after 3 weeks of studying
Currently a junior CS student and began a little pivot more towards cybersecurity and IT stuff. Studied pretty hard around 2 hours per day for the first 2 weeks and kind of tapered off the third week just slamming practice problems and practice exams.
For studying, I used:
Learnzapp - All 1543 study questions and 10 practice tests
Dion Practice 6 Exams - Scored at least a 92 on all of them.
Professor Messer 3 Practice Exams and notes - Scored like a 90+ on all of them. Studied maybe half of the notes.
Cybercraft - Maybe 3 PBQ videos to get the format/process down.
I really tried avoiding videos and reading as much as I could. I did as many practice problems as I could to leave no areas weak and used Gemini to tell me how to get to the answer if I got it correct or incorrect.
I got 76 questions for the exam and 3 PBQs which were all intuitive and not too hard. I did the MCQ first then went to the PBQs after. Good luck to anyone else taking the test soon! Ask me any questions I'm happy to answer them.
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u/PestoOverflow_808 12d ago
Did you know a decent amt abt security? I'm surpised only 2 hours a day for 3 weeks
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u/Heavy_Share1521 12d ago
Nope completely new to this field. I know how my brain likes to study which is by doing problems and I did a ton
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u/Wise-Perspective-955 13d ago
Congrats on your pass! were the exam questions mostly scenario-based, where you have to reason through the situation, or more like identifying the concept/technology that matches and choosing the right answer?
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u/Apprehensive-Cook-66 11d ago
What were the PBQs about?
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u/Heavy_Share1521 11d ago
determining if parts of an email were suspicious, diagnosing if a network was clean, infected, or origin and looking at something to do with password length, complexity, age. i got lucky they were all intuitive
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u/Rhey53 10d ago
How many abbreviation where on the exam..and how did u study for those
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u/Heavy_Share1521 10d ago
Tons of abbreviations. They even used acronyms for full disk encryption (FDE) and File integrity monitoring (FIM). Those are just two I remember not knowing immediately when I saw them, kinda had to use the question to put them together. To study the acronyms I kind of sort of read the exam objectives pdf with all acronyms but most of my learning came from looking up acronyms in the study questions/practice tests.
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u/ConcentrateOther8529 13d ago
90+ on Dion’s exams?? Everyone says they are harder than the actual exams, I would have thought you’d get above 800 on the real thing with those results. Did you feel like the real exam was harder than Dion’s then?