The World According to Mitch

I maintain a spreadsheet that lists every single certification exam that I have sat since my first one in December of 2001. Each line consists of the date, the exam title, the exam code, the result, and the certification that it was applicable to (since many certifications, especially in those early days, required multiple exams to achieve). To date, I have sat one hundred and nine exams. I enjoy showing my students this list because it shows how many exams I have failed. I use it as a lesson to remind them that not passing only becomes a fail if you let it stop you; if you take that failure as a learning opportunity to improve and then come back and pass the exam then it was definitely not a failure.

In addition to the columns that I mentioned, there is also a column for Passes and a column for Fails. Whenever I take a new exam I enter all of the details, and then I add a simple 1 in one of the two columns. At the bottom those digits are added up to let me know exactly how many exams I passed… and how many I did not. The number of failures is way higher than I wish it was, but then I have seldom chosen the easy path.

When my students tell me that they are embarrassed that they might fail their exam I open this spreadsheet and show them. I say, ‘look at the sum total in that last column. It is more than likely that I have failed more certification exams than you will ever take in your career. You are telling me that you are embarrassed? Not passing is only a failure if you give up. If you take that opportunity to learn from the experience then you will pass the next time.’

Every exam score report has a section that helps you to improve. Microsoft exam score reports, whether you pass or fail, shows you on a bar chart your performance on each objective domain. CompTIA score reports (also regardless of the outcome) show you each subdomain that you missed a question on. ISC2, which does not provide a score but only a result, does not do this (at least not on the two exams that I have taken with them, but I am told they do provide feedback per objective domain on the CISSP exam). Other than those, I have also taken exams with VMware (which I do not believe provided such detail).

If you walk out of an exam and you did not pass then yes, it is going to cost you the price of rebooking the exam… but as I have proven far too many times in my career, if you take your score report home and focus your studies on the aspects that you were weak on, then you can be confident that the next time you sit the exam then you will succeed. Please note that I have proven this both ways: There are nine exams that I have failed (some multiple times) because I did not go back and study what I missed; there are fourteen exams that I failed that I would eventually pass (on a couple of occasions within the week). Why? I went back and reviewed what I needed to focus on.

They say that if at first you don’t succeed then skydiving is really not for you. Other than that, most things in life do afford us a second chance. If you are purchasing your exam voucher, some vendors give you the opportunity to buy a safety net – if you do not pass the exam, then you can retake the exam at no extra cost. These insurance plans are certainly not free, but they usually cost much less than the cost of paying for the exam a second time. If you are unsure how you are going to do then maybe this option maybe a good option for you. I should mention that some vendors only offer these options from time to time, but it is worth looking into.

You should also remember that the guy who graduates last in his med school class is called Doctor. You do not need to get a perfect score on your exam, you simply need to pass. Nobody will ever see your score report, and with very few exceptions there is absolutely no benefit to scoring with a minimum passing score versus getting a perfect score. The only exceptions are for some certified trainer programs – a few companies require you to score much higher than the minimum in order to be authorized to teach a class. In other words: good enough is always good enough, and perfect is never worth the added cost and effort. Striving for perfection can be counterproductive so if you think you know your material well enough to pass then book your exam now… do not wait.

Why do I say this? Too many of my students tell me that they are consistently scoring 92% on practice tests so they are not ready for the actual exam. I want to shout at them that yes they are ready! I do not yell at them of course, but I try to remind them that they do not need a perfect score on their exam… only a minimum passing score.

Yes, the minimum passing score is going to be different on every exam. For example, every Microsoft exam I have ever taken has a passing score of 700… but that number is not a percentage; rather it is weighted based on psychometric evaluation by a team at Microsoft Learn. What does that mean? For some exams the passing score may be 64% while on others it could be 83%… and both of those will be marked as 700/1000. I have taken six different CompTIA exams and there were five minimum passing scores on them… but I am reasonably sure that even with those (which are scored from 100-900 by the way) they are psychometrically weighted. Yes, the passing score for ITF+ is 650 which is lower than the passing score 0f 750 on the CySA+ exam, but I strongly suspect that the actual difference between the two is much more than the 100 points suggests. ISC2 does not give an actual score, only the result – you passed or you did not.

I am not going to tell you that you should not get stressed or anxious in advance of your exam. One hundred and nine exams later and I still get stressed and anxious for many of them. With that said, booking the exam is a good way to constrain the stress and anxiety; it is no longer open-ended, now there is a date and a time when you will sit down and prove to yourself and to the certifying body that your hard work paid off. It also gives you a deadline which, if you are like me, is a good way to put an end to procrastination. On this day and at this time I will sit down to find out if my hard work thus far was enough, or at the very least I will know what I need to improve on before coming back for another try. What reminded me of this is something that happened very recently to me:

Recently I had an exam booked that I was extremely nervous about. I was so nervous that I spent months procrastinating, even after I sat the course. Near the end of June I decided to purchase a study guide that my instructor had recommended, but even with that the book sat on my desk. The first week of July I said to myself ‘no more!‘ I booked the exam for two weeks later. I now had a deadline, and I spent the next two weeks studying as much as I could. I went through that book and then when I realized it was weak on a few items I ordered and devoured another (much larger) book that went into much more detail. I still was not sure that I was ready… but the morning of the exam I woke up at peace, knowing that before the day was done I would either have passed the exam or failed it… but I would know, and the stress and anxiety that had been weighing me down would be off my shoulders. I arrived at the testing centre to discover that the building had been evacuated for safety reasons (a transformer blew up apparently). I stood outside the building and contacted Pearson Vue (who administers the exams) but it seemed their local staff had not advised them of the evacuation, so while they would open an investigation, it would be 3-5 business days before they would be able to tell me if I would be allowed to reschedule, or if I would have to pay for another exam voucher (USD$750). As much as the financial hit would hurt… none of the stress and anxiety was off my shoulders. Quite the opposite – since I now had no timeline, they were exacerbated. It was only a couple of days later when the team at ISC2 cleared the problems up and let me rebook that those original weights on my shoulder were back to where they had been… where I have a day and a time when I will be able to sit down to find out if my hard work thus far was enough, or at the very least what I will need to improve on before coming back for another try.

I do not know anyone who loves taking tests. I know that there are some people who are more comfortable taking tests than others, and this is not usually related to how well they know the material but rather their own ability to cope with the stress and anxiety of the exam room. I keep coming back to those two words, don’t I? That’s because nearly everyone I have ever spoken to who says they are comfortable taking tests have better skills to cope with stress and anxiety than nearly everyone who has ever told me that they are not comfortable taking tests. Where do I fall on that spectrum? I suppose I am usually less anxious than many, but that partially depends on several factors, including how comfortable I am with the material. Wherever you sit on that spectrum, find a way to taper or relieve them, whether that be exercise or watching TV for an hour, or possibly enjoying a cigar and a dram when you are finished studying for the day. Just remember, in the grand scheme of things the fate of the world does not rest on how well you do on the exam… and if you have to retake it then you can.

Good luck to you and remember… you got this!