CompTIA A+ Training and Certification

Posted by Teacher of Cisco .
  • Agregar a Technorati
  • Agregar a Del.icio.us
  • Agregar a DiggIt!
  • Agregar a Yahoo!
  • Agregar a Google
  • Agregar a Meneame
  • Agregar a Furl
  • Agregar a Reddit
  • Agregar a Magnolia
  • Agregar a Blinklist
  • Agregar a Blogmarks

CompTIA A+ Training and Certification

CompTIA A+ Training and Certification

Posted: 15 Jan 2012 02:35 AM PST


Over the many years technology has changed and CompTIA has rolled along with those changes. Only A+ and CTT+ require two exams to attain certification.

Beginning January 1, 2011, one of the biggest changes CompTIA brought about was ending certification for life. The theory was A+ was considered a broad and entry-level certification. This meant that a successful candidate would've either left the business, or moved up the food chain.

To meet the standards set by the ISO (International Organization for standardization) and ANSI (American National Standards Inst.) CompTIA now requires either recertification every few years, or maintaining a log with them, proving Continual Educational Units (CEU)'s.

Honestly, there is a lot of bad information out on the Internet about the A+ exams. It may have been true at the time it was created, but isn't now. For example:

The older exam 220-301 series in A+ had a question like what is the standard length of the parallel cable? It was a bad question because of the radio dial choices, two were actually correct. It depended on whether the parallel I/O was IEEE 1284 (15 feet) or not (10 feet).

In the older days to get a NIC card working you had to throw Jumper switches to set the IRQ and memory I/O address. These ISA-based cards have been long gone. So too is being able to regurgitate on the exam what IRQ typically does what.

What is needed to pass the CompTIA A+ Certification

Two exams are needed to attain the CompTIA A+ Certification. These are 220-701 (CompTIA A+ Essentials) and 220-702 (CompTIA A+ Practical Application).

Passing Score:

675 for CompTIA A+ Essentials
700 for CompTIA A+ Practical Application
(on a scale of 100-900)

Number of Questions:

100 questions for each exam.

Exam Languages Supported:

English, Spanish, German, Turkish, Japanese, Traditional Chinese (Taiwan), Simplified Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, Arabic

Tips for the Exam:

When taking a CompTIA exam, always remember what would be a 'best practice'. Each question is standalone, and has nothing to do with other questions you may have seen.

Further, keep in mind a 'best practice' sometimes has little to do with the real world.

The second test for A+ (Practical Application), while being pretty fair, it can be daunting to someone without a broad background of experience. An exam candidate could be challenged by questions that are other than Microsoft Windows.

How to Prepare:

One final thought is the exams are not inexpensive. It can be costly to do a reconnaissance mission on either A+ exam. An excellent resource for keeping the overhead down would be to see the videos done by Paul Gadbois. The series from trainsignal.com is over 38 hours (equivalent to five days in the classroom) and is available online for less than $300. That comes out to less than eight dollars an hour!

Trainsignal is CAQC (CompTIA Authorized Quality Curriculum) approved.

0 comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)
Post a Comment