I'm really excited that you've decided to take the
exam with us as part of your preparation.
I really want to go through different aspects of preparing yourself both
mentally and physically to take that cys A exam and pass.
Remember,
our goal is to pass the first time every time not to take it
five or six different times and hope we pass as part of that.
I really want you to schedule your
now scheduling your exam.
Now psychologically prepares you for a deadline that
deadline says to you mentally that I need
to study for my exam by studying for
your exam and placing that deadline upon yourself.
You are more apt to study every day and provide yourself with a
legitimate schedule that you need to follow in order to pass that exam after
no one likes spending 400 plus dollars on a museam that is going to come and go.
You want to let other people know, get that support within your structure.
Let your friends, your coworkers, your relatives, even your teachers know
I'm planning to take that cys A exam.
They'll help you by providing in both mentorship and support even
in those times when you think that you can't do it.
I want you to dedicate some time to studying for your exam.
It does no good to pay for a course that you don't actually listen to. Remember.
Go through and provide yourself with a schedule.
I'm going to study for at least one hour a day is not enough.
You need to say to yourself,
I'm going to study from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. Maybe it's
7 a.m. to 8 a.m. Maybe it's 630 in the morning.
Whatever you prefer for dedicated time is you need to follow through and identify
when that time is and block that off from everybody else around you.
If you allot that dedicated time, you need to say to your significant other.
I need to study and this is the time that
I'm allowing for myself to study and pass this exam.
I need you to have a positive attitude.
Understand that life gets us down and sometimes we have a bad day.
If you miss one dedicated time studying, it's ok. It's not the end of the world.
Let's just pick up again tomorrow if you had a week where you just didn't study.
Yeah, it. And we don't want to do that.
But let's jump back on that horse and get back to it.
Understand that having a positive attitude,
it's 9/10 of actually passing what we're going for.
We watch lectures that you don't understand if there's
a difficult concept and you're just not getting it,
rewatch it
if you
rewatch it once and it still doesn't click, take a break,
take a day and then come back to it tomorrow and rewatch it.
You'd be amazed how just a limited time of break,
whether it's two hours or 24 hours of rewatch that same episode.
Really lets make us click inside of our own heads and allow us to go.
Oh, that's what they were talking about. That light bulb will come back on.
I promise you
and then lots and lots of practice exams when it comes down to it.
When I took my own siss exam, I took so many practice exams.
It was absolutely ridiculous.
I remember my own wife telling me my God,
how many practice exams are you going to take before you actually take the exam?
And the answer is as many as I need to feel comfortable before I take that exam.
Remember, we want you to have that 85% pass rate before you walk into the test center.
You should walk into that test center with the idea that I'm already going to pass.
All you need to do is walk in and take their exam. It's a formality.
You should already know that you're going to
pass before you even walk through the doors.
Have that confidence level and you get that confidence level from
taking practice exams and passing them with that 85% level.
If you can do that, you're setting yourself for success.
And I have no doubt in my mind that you're going to pass this exam
as part of your preparation for the exam.
The first thing you need to do is actually purchase the exam voucher.
Now, the current cost to the Comptia
website is $404 but prices tend to go up or down each year
and there could be associated tax and fees depending on where you live.
This is located at the comptia.org website.
Another way that we can purchase in a voucher is through
a
discount voucher program.
Total seminars has one of those discount vouchers available
to them as a student through our process.
And through this course,
you can purchase a discounted voucher through totalsem.com.
This provides you about a 10% discount
that's available through most discounted voucher programs.
Finally,
you can be eligible for an educational discount if you have a.edu email address.
The third way is through an educational discount.
If you have a.edu email address that is currently valid and that you have access to
with this.edu email address,
you can go to the academic dash store.comptia.org website and purchase
a voucher for about a 40% discount as an academic student.
Let's take a look at how to purchase those
vouchers through one of those three measures that I've mentioned
once you've arrived at the
comptia.org website and go to the certifications you
can find the cys A voucher available here.
If you scroll down, you can see the different aspects of the CSO
003 cybersecurity exam.
It identifies the launch date, the number of questions associated with it.
In this case, a maximum of 85 the length of the test as well as the passing score
at the very bottom.
You can see that the cys A exam can be taken either at a test
center or through an online testing format by pressing the view price and cart.
We can see the actual cost of the exam. As of today, it
is $404.
You can proceed to check out and it will provide you an email through your valid email
address of the peer review website and how to sign up on a step by step basis.
If you go to the total seminars website,
you can see there's an exam vouchers plugin right here by pressing on this tab,
you can scroll down and identify the voucher you want to purchase.
In our case, the cys A
exam by pressing the buy now button,
it will provide access to the cys A exam
here. You can see the cys A exam voucher and by selecting your country,
it will tell you the actual cost of the exam.
For instance, in the United States, it's $362.09
as of today.
Finally, the academic store for the comptia
exam.
If you scroll all the way down,
you'll see certification vouchers by pressing the browse button.
It will list all the vouchers available for academic students by scrolling down.
We can find the cys A voucher
and here we can see the cys A voucher on the academic store is $262.
Even as of today's date.
Now that we purchased our voucher,
we're ready to sign up for an exam date and identify the
date and time in which we want to take the actual exam.
This can be done either in person or online.
Now, I want to take a moment and talk about the downsides of taking an online test.
I've had numerous students that have taken an online exam
thinking this was the better way to go after all.
I save time. I don't have to drive to the testing center.
I have a more open scheduling aspect
and it just overall is an easier, more comfortable position.
In order to take the exam online,
I want to take a moment to talk about the
downsides of online testing through the Pearson view system.
I've had numerous students complain about the fact that they've gone through,
they're taking their exam and a vehicle drive by with music blaring.
The Pearson view moderator hears that is someone talking and they
instantly disqualified the exam because they heard talking in the background.
They perceived it as cheating.
I've also heard horror stories of people taking the exam
and their wife or their daughter or even son pops the
room ahead into the room and they ask a simple
question because there's no talking allowed during the exam process.
They've nullified the exam and that exam no longer counts.
You don't get a refund on your money.
You don't get an additional voucher and the exam is just gone is
kut you've wasted your time and more importantly,
your money on taking an exam that's no longer valid.
If it was me,
I would just drive to this testing center unless it's more than two hours away.
You really just want to take it in person.
There's less likelihood that you'll be disqualified for
something that I just don't see to be valid
and it's going to make you in that position where you're just ready to take the exam,
it's set up properly.
You don't have to clear up your desk.
You don't have to clear up the pictures on the walls.
You can just walk in, show your ID,
prepare yourself mentally and physically to take the
exam and then pass with flying colors.
However,
let's talk about how to actually set up that
voucher as you're going through the Pearson View website.
Let's discover that. Now
here you can see, I'm at the Pearson View website, specifically the
Comptia portion. If you Google Pearson view
Comptia, it'll be one of the very first things that pops up. I'm gonna click on login
area and easy that you can either register for a new account if you've never taken one
before or you can provide your email address and
password to sign in to your Pearson view Comptia
website. I'm going to sign in with my Comptia
credentials and once you've logged in, you can now schedule the exam.
I'm gonna schedule now,
I'm going to provide my information
and then once I've saved my updates,
I'll be taken to a screen that says find my exam. I'm gonna type in cys A right here.
You'll notice that the
comptia cybersecurity analyst cys A plus certification exam.
I'm gonna click on that.
It's going to process my request and it's going to ask me,
do I want to do it at a test center or do I want to do it online?
Obviously, you know my feelings about this, I'm going to do it in person.
It's gonna tell me, hey, you need to have your photo ID available.
It identifies you with what you should expect and provides a
short video so that you can learn to be prepared for that
in person testing environment.
Once we've identified that we're gonna hit next,
it's gonna ask me for my preferred language. Obviously, I speak English.
I'm gonna press next again
and it's asking me,
are you temporarily in another country and plan to take the CYS A exam outside the
country?
Obviously, I'm in the United States. So I'm going to press L and continue forward.
It's going to talk about its admission policy,
the reschedule policy and how I have one full business day or 24 hours,
which I can reschedule or cancel my current appointment.
I'm gonna scroll down and agree
and then it's gonna ask me where I would like to take the exam.
It's going to sort my different testing centers based on
the distance from my home address that I've already provided.
I'm gonna click on one of these test centers and hit next.
Once I've identified the test center, it's gonna give me a range of dates. Now,
you can see here that I have available to me on May 30th and 31st.
But if I want to go six weeks out, which is my recommendation,
I'm gonna go into June and then into July,
its gonna take a second for the calendar to catch up.
So six weeks out puts me at July 2nd. I'm gonna click on July 2nd of 2024
and then it's gonna ask me what time frame I want
if I want a 12 hour clock or 24 hour clock.
Now, me personally, I prefer a 24 hour clock but not everybody is like me.
It's gonna provide me the next available appointment in this time frame and it says
I can take my exam from 09 or 9 a.m. to 1230 in the afternoon.
If I press book this appointment it's gonna go forward with the process
and it's going to give me a little snapshot of everything that I agreed on.
It provides me the exam details. I'm signing up for CS 0003, Comptia
Cybersecurity Analyst certification exam.
My appointment time length is 210 minutes.
My appointment is on Tuesday, July 2nd at 2024 at 9 a.m.
It's going to tell me the cost associated with it.
And if I scroll down it,
say proceed to checkout.
Now,
I know that it looks like they're going to
charge you $404 but we already purchased our exam.
So we're just going to proceed to checkout.
And here you can see that the total cost is $404.
And right here, I can provide my voucher or promotion code now, very,
very rarely the cys A or
commotion code for a discount.
So I would recommend going through a third party vendor like we talked
about on total seminars for that 10% discount or that academia website.
If you're an eu student
and providing that voucher here. Once I plug in that voucher, I press apply
the number or total will zero out
and I can press next.
Now, you can get from here to the actual exchange,
but I do want to point out two things as we're going through this one,
make sure you complete the full transaction even with
the voucher and promotion code available to you.
Make sure you get a reference email from Comptia
and Pearce of you identifying that you are scheduled to take that exam.
I can't tell you how many students I've had that thought they signed up for an exam.
Never got that reference email. Only to realize they never completed the process.
Make sure you complete the process in order to get that reference email.
The second thing I want to talk about is if you need to cancel or reschedule,
if you reschedule your exam,
make sure you go through the entire process
and receive that reference email at the end.
If you don't and you sign up for the new exam,
they may come back at you and say you never signed up to
reschedule your exam.
That money is now a forfeit because you missed your original exam date.
Make sure you have that reference email dictating that you did.
In fact reschedule or complete the actual process to certify your new exam time.
Once you've scheduled your exam,
there's a few more things that I wanted to go through.
I wanted to provide you some quick tips to
better prepare yourself in order to take a comp
exam.
If you've never taken one before or maybe it's just
been a while since you completed your last exam.
The first tip I want to provide you is those first
two or three questions in your exam are considered performance based questions
I want you to click that little red flag at the very
top right hand side of your screen and skip the question.
Don't read it, don't spend any time on it, just go past it.
You're going to skip to the very first multiple choice question
and then start your exam from there. There is a method behind my madness.
A lot of those performance based questions are very detailed and
they take a little bit of time to actually go through.
It is believe it or not possible to pass
your exam without doing those performance based questions.
Do I recommend not doing them? Absolutely not.
I want to get your mind in the game.
And that process starts with multiple choice questions.
Those are the easier questions.
It prepares you to do those performance based questions,
your nurse leave calmer when you go back to those questions,
when we do those performance based questions,
you've already completed all those multiple choice questions,
you've had time to relax, you're in the groove of completing your exam.
So we're going to start with that first multiple choice question.
Once you start that, I want you to read the question,
read it slowly.
Don't be like me and go through and read the question
as fast as you can and then provide an answer.
I want you to slow down. And I mean that literally slow down and read the question.
You have about a minute to a minute and a half to answer each one of those questions.
On average,
it should take you right around 45 seconds to a minute to read through the question,
read the answers,
read the question again to identify exactly what is the question asked
me and then answer what the question is asking, not what you think it's asking,
but what the question is actually answering.
And I know that sounds confusing.
But as you're going through questions,
realize that the question is asking one thing.
But the scenario could be taking you in a different direction.
Get your mind in sync with that question that it's
actually asking and then answer it as you proceed through,
follow the same technique, I'm going to read the,
then read the answers,
then reread the question to find out exactly what the question
is asking of me to reread the answers and then answer appropriately
at times you may come across a question that you just know the answer of
this method we're going to talk about today
is talk about the process of elimination.
There will be four answers attributed to most multiple choice questions.
I want you to go through and knock off the ones. You know, it's not
if you get answers and you're looking between 12 or three different answers
that it could be and it provides four right off the bat.
Let's get rid of one. If we can't,
that knocks our chances even if we're guessing down from
25% up to 33% just by knocking off one question.
If we can knock off two, which is the 5050 method, then we've
got a 50% chance of getting the correct answer. We know it's not this one. We know.
It's not that one that only leaves me two viable answers to answer this question.
Knowing that I now have a 50% chance.
The next thing I want to talk about is that gut feeling, believe it or not.
It's a real thing.
I can't tell you how many times I went around the classroom while
students were taking their final exam or midterm to have the right answer,
then they reread the question
two or three minutes later and then
come back to it and they reanswer the question incorrectly.
I don't want to ignore that gut feeling you may have if you think the
answer is this way and you don't have a reason to change your answer,
don't change it.
Rely on that gut feeling, believe it or not more often than not. It's right.
If you get to a question and you are completely lost or
maybe you even had to use that 5050 methodology and you're not sure
at the top right hand side of the screen, there's a flag. I want you to press that flag.
We'll come back to that question.
If we have time later down the road,
it's not uncommon to go through a question that you just don't know the answer of
or maybe you're pretty reliant that it may be one of these two answers,
but you're not entirely sure.
It's not uncommon to have a question,
five or six points down the way which identified
an acronym or made your memory get jogged.
Where now you know that answer,
go back and answer that question even it takes an extra 10 or 15 seconds to do so.
I always recommend that if you answer a question incorrectly,
only to find the answer is something else later down the road,
immediately go back and answer that question correctly.
Remember it's all about statistics.
The more questions you get the right,
the higher percentage of chance you have of passing the exam.
The final thing that I want to provide for tips
based is that if you don't know the answer,
yes, remember if you don't answer a question, it's automatically a zero.
If you guess at the question, you at least have a 25% chance of getting it right.
I'll take 25% over zero every single day. And I recommend you do the same
as you're going through the exam and you're
fling yourself and you're really getting into the groove.
You'll start to notice that your nerves calm down
at the end of your exam, you'll see this highlighted point and it'll say,
do you wish to go back through questions that you missed?
Absolutely.
You do any of those ly questions,
which should be those performance based questions you're
now going to go back to remember.
We're gonna go back to those performance based questions before we go back to
those slide questions that you may not have had a good feeling about.
Once we've identified those performance based questions,
you should have a little bit of time left
over to go back through those slide questions.
I've never taken an exam where I didn't have 10 or 15 minutes
left over at the end to go back through those flied answers.
Once we've identified those, now we can go back to those flied exam questions.
And again,
I recommend you read them just like you did before go through
them and then answer the question if you're looking at an answer and
you've already answered that the first time around now is not the time
to change your answer unless you have a good reason to do.
So. Remember, trust that gut feeling.