How You Study Matters as Much as What You Study: 7 Habits of People Who Pass the First Time

After years of teaching certification camps, I can usually tell who's going to pass the first time, and it's rarely the person who studied the most hours. It's the person who studied with a plan. How you study matters just as much as what you study, whether it's CompTIA, Cisco, ISC2, Microsoft or PMI.

Reading and rereading feels productive. It isn't.

Most candidates finish a course, reread their notes, grind through practice questions until the answers look familiar, and book the exam. Then the real exam words things differently, and that familiarity disappears. Recognizing an answer and actually knowing it are two different skills, and the exam only rewards the second one.

Here are the seven habits I see in the people who pass.

1. Start from the official exam objectives. Every vendor publishes a blueprint that lists exactly what's tested and how much each domain is worth. Print it. Everything you study should map to a line on it, and the heaviest domains get the most time.
2. Take a baseline before you study. Find out what you already know before you spend a single hour. A short diagnostic tells you where your gaps are, so you don't burn a week reviewing things you've already mastered.
3. Test yourself instead of rereading. Close the book and try to explain the topic, draw the diagram or answer the question cold. Pulling information out of your memory is what makes it stick.
4. Study a little, often. Forty-five minutes a day beats a six-hour Saturday cram. Spreading your sessions out and coming back to topics over several days builds memory that lasts until exam day.
5. Get your hands on the gear. Configure it, break it and fix it. Labs turn a fact you memorized into something you understand, and scenario questions reward understanding.
6. Rehearse exam day with timed practice exams. Pacing, focus and nerves are skills too. Take full-length timed practice tests under exam conditions, with no notes and no pausing, before the real thing.
7. Keep a mistake log. Every wrong answer is free information. Write down what you missed and why, then go back to those topics. Your mistake log becomes your final week's study plan.

The goal isn't to study harder. It's to stop guessing what to study.

Study your weak domains, not your favorite ones

Everyone likes studying what they're already good at. It feels great, and it doesn't move your score. That's why our thinQmaster practice exams track your mastery in every exam domain and adjust each session. Domains you've mastered get fewer questions, and weak ones get more. Here's an example of the kind of readout you see:

Free and low-cost resources

• Free thinQmaster preview: try five questions for any exam, with no account, email or card.
• Free cheat sheets for CCNA, ENCOR, ENARSI and Network+ in our study library.
• Labs: online remote labs, prebuilt Packet Tracer and GNS3 labs, and a guide to building your own home lab, all on our Class Rooms page.
• Not in IT? Our new free site, QuizMe, covers more than 125 professional exams, from nursing and HR to aviation and finance.

— Scott