Especially this your rst time taking certifi cation exam

Taking the Test 365

■ 60 Minutes Remaining: Two thirds of the exam finished.

If you do fi nd you are having diffi culty with a particular set of questions, just skip them. The exam provides a feature to mark questions for “Review” that you can later come back to. Remember that all questions on the exam, easy or diffi cult, are weighted the same. It is a far better use of your time to spend fi ve minutes answering ten easy questions than the same amount of time answering one diffi cult question.

You might come to a question that looks diffi cult and immediately realize it is going to take a lot of time. In this case, skip it before even starting on it. You can save the most dif-fi cult problems for the end so that you can get all the easy ones solved early on. Of course, you shouldn’t mark every question for “Review,” so use that sparingly. For example, if you only need 30 more seconds to solve a specifi c question, it is better to fi nish it so you do not have to come back to it later. The trick is to not get stuck on a diffi cult question for a long period of time.

Although we recommend you try to avoid taking the practice exams so much that you memorize the questions and answers, we do recommend you keep taking them until you can fi nish each practice exam in under two hours. Remember not to move on to the next one until you can pass the previous exam in the allotted time. If not, study more and go back to drilling on the Review Questions. The idea is that you want to be good at quickly reading through the question, honing in on the key concept the question is asking, and being able to select the answer that best represents it.

366 Appendix B ■ Study Tips