Anxiety and Test-taking
Over the past month, several students have reached out to me asking my opinion about whether they are ready to take a certification exam. I’ve also been preparing for and taking exams, so I was looking for a root cause for this ‘am I prepared’ question.
Everyone should understand that anxiety is a normal psychological response to fear. Another physical response to fear is fight or flight. While some people seem fearless, if you ask them if they're afraid, they will likely tell you they have developed some coping method. If you are pursuing a credential that requires you to pass some assessment, you will experience some fear and anxiety. People have said to me that I seem fearless when it comes to taking certification exams. I’m not. I’ve created a coping mechanism that may make it appear to others like I’m fearless.
My coping mechanism is to:
develop the best understanding I can about what will be on the test,
study and prepare based on that understanding and
recognize that the test-taking experience will help me understand what I don’t know.
It’s early February, and I have already taken and passed two certification exams this year. While I was pleased with my scores, I didn’t earn a perfect score on either exam. The reports showed me exam objectives connected to questions I likely got wrong. As an instructor, I don’t ignore that report because I want to determine if my understanding of some topic was incorrect or if there are some poorly written questions on the exam.
By the way, there are always poorly written questions on certification exams.
One thing that is missing from my coping mechanism is how I know when I have prepared enough. Much of my recent work involves pursuing certifications rather than gaining general or specialized knowledge about some topic or technology. I’m currently studying for and seeking the AWS AI Practitioner and Security Specialty certifications. I’m also interested in cryptocurrencies and applications of blockchain technology. On a completely different note, I’m a gardener, and I am interested in vermiculture. Yes, vermiculture is worm farming.
I mention worm farming because part of my interest is being able to produce fertilizer for my gardens in the spring. My research about vermiculture is focused on what I can do in early February to prepare for planting outdoors in mid-April. I mention this because, like my worm farming, I put dates to my exam preparation. Those dates (sometimes a day but often a week) are the due dates by which I want to complete a goal or earn a credential.
Setting dates is important because of another psychological response to fear. That’s procrastination. Many people who fail an assessment find it easy to put it out of their minds and forget everything. I used to do that. I learned that procrastination doesn’t help and can hurt my understanding of the topics I need to know to pass that assessment. That’s why I look at the score report after every exam, pass or fail, and extract clues about what it says I need to improve.
I plan to be able to take the AWS AI Practitioner exam and a possible retake before February 20th. Why that date? If I pass the exam, I will earn the AI Practitioner certification and an early adopter badge. If I don’t meet that objective (and fail the exam twice), I’ll still pursue AI Practitioner because I’ll have the additional knowledge gained by taking the exam twice before.
If you follow my newsletter, you may have noticed that I mentioned studying for the AWS Security Specialty exam last year. I had planned to take that exam in December. What I learned through my studies and practice exams was that I wasn’t prepared. I took practice exams from AWS and passed. I took other practice exams from the author of the Udemy course I completed and was unhappy with those results. I purchased practice exams from another source and confirmed that I probably wasn’t ready. I learned that I need to expand my AWS knowledge to better prepare for the scenario-based questions presented in AWS exams. I now plan on taking that exam on March 28th.
The key point here is that anxiety is a normal and expected emotion. Humans naturally feel anxious when faced with assessments or evaluations, such as taking an exam or during a job interview. A typical response to such situations is the fight-or-flight reaction, which can lead to avoidance or a desire to escape what we fear. Procrastination is also a typical psychological response to assessments. Coping mechanisms are strategies to confront physical and psychological fears, helping us to face rather than flee from our challenges.
Cisco Ethical Hacker Course Update
I've been working my way through the Cisco Ethical Hacker (EH) course and wanted to provide an update. With virtually anything that is presented in either printed or electronic formats, there are sometimes errors. I’ve encountered errors in the Cisco EH course. Most of the exercises were minor, but some had bugs that prevented them from being completed as presented. I documented what I found in each case and filed a report via the Network Academy website. In each case, I received an email response. None of the issues I found and reported were, in my opinion, ‘show-stoppers’ in that they stopped me from learning about a topic. I reached out to Omar Santos (a friend of mine who led this development and is the person in the videos), and he assured me the Network Academy team is working to fix all issues.
My name is Brian Ford. Welcome to my newsletter. Many know me as a technology instructor, teaching networking and cybersecurity courses. I’m also a coach who works one-on-one with people who want to learn about and understand Internet, cloud, and cybersecurity technologies. I’m also a technology researcher investigating various cybersecurity topics, including how web browsers and protocols can be used and abused.
Things that I’m going to help readers with:
Choose what technologies, certifications, and career choices to pursue.
Become lifelong learners and earn various technical certifications.
Those who have earned a certification maintain and use it to their advantage.
Please look at these posts for help maintaining your CompTIA and ISC2 certifications.
Have you submitted CEUs or CPEs and been audited? I'd like to hear about your audit experience.
I tell all my clients and students that I get tremendous personal satisfaction from what I do, not because of the paycheck but because of the impact. I encourage clients to keep in touch with me. If you find this newsletter helpful or if you have something you want to share with others, please don’t hesitate to message me.
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