#3.5.7 testout lab full#

I think the time limit is two hours, and I know I took nearly 90 minutes to complete the exam.

#3.5.7 testout lab full#

Give yourself the full time limit of the exam to take it. You will have learned this in one of the course's earlier labs, but it's easy to forget this when you are taking the certification exam. A real computer often takes a few seconds to drill through its startup sequence, but these simulation computer's restart very quickly. If you need to modify a computer's BIOS settings, hit F2 immediately on restart. For most exam items it was possible to ignore this since there was no need to move around in the lab context, but there were a few where you definitely needed to. Each lab is a simulation that exists in context, such as ‘you are logged into a desktop machine on the third floor of the office building’, and this context is represented in a set of breadcrumb links in the upper left of the lab interface. I found the wording of these requirements to be very helpful as well in simply navigating to what needs to be done in the lab. In the case of a task that, for example, requires you to modify a Group Policy setting in Group Policy editor the exact policy you will be looking for is included word for word in the requirement, and glossing over it will make it frankly impossible to succeed. Read each requirement of the certification lab carefully. It is firstly the whole point of using Testout in the first place, and secondly the experience of completing the labs will prepare you for navigating and understanding the certification test. In order to get a score from week to week you are only ‘required’ to complete certain milestone activities, but really DO EVERYTHING. Here are my key tips for success (and these may seem like strong hints, but it's stuff that is definitely part of the work required earlier in the course):Ĭomplete all the labs required for the course. I would also recommend digging into the ‘Network’ tutorials to review switch security, because the configuration tasks I ran across included things that were not easy to just hunt and peck your way through. But I will say this: any tutorial for Testout that you can remember included the use of Group Policy editor is something you should review. I'm not going to go into any real details of what is involved because, hey, it's a required activity for the course.

The exam is comprised of fifteen questions, and about a dozen of them are lab simulations where the test taker is required to complete some configuration task or drag and drop activity that mirrors real life security scenario. We cover very client-specific like completing tasks in Microsoft Group Policy Editor and Cisco switch management, and I suspect not a lot of my students have ever had their hands on these tools.Īnd this certification exam really demands it. Each week the course works methodically through tutorials covering subjects from physical security to perimeter, network, and application issues. I am posting this summary for my students at CSU who will be taking this certification test after having completed all the Testout tutorials required for my IST 350 course. Well that's not entirely true, but the exam took far longer than I had expected.