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Strategies for Passing the CompTIA N+ exam

Time management

If you are taking the exam from home/office in a proctored environment, you have access to a digital whiteboard from the moment the exam is opened up to you. Once the exam is opened up, your exam timer is not activated yet. Take advantage of this time to prepare any tables you may need during your exam, in this way you are ensuring you have access to your entire alloted time for the exam. For example, subnetting tables will make it easier to do the subnet calculations during the exam.

During the exam there is a timer at the top right corner of the screen, showing the remaining time and which question you are on & remaining questions. The first questions are scenario based, followed by the multiple choice questions. Wether you do the scenario questions at the begining or the end depends on your personal strategy, however, if you leave them for the end be sure to have enough time to answer all the questions.

The calculations

For subnetting, I found Professor Messer’s 7 second subnetting worked a charm. By preparing the tables before the exam started, it made the subnet questions a case of going through a process rather than attempting to rebuild everything from scratch.

Cramming

A large part of the exam involves remembering the OSI model, protocols & ports. Learn the vocabulary for OSI model, hardware & what the data looks like at each layer and that’s a large chunk of the exam content taken care of. However, there are 65’536 possible ports, and that’s not counting for UDP or TCP connections. Learn the common applications and how their variants differ (FTP, TFTP, SFTP, FTPS etc.) in terms of ports and how the clients & servers connect.

Training Sources

The Professor Messer N+ guide on Youtube:

Practice Quizzes at www.examcompass.com

Good luck and have fun preparing