If you're like most exam candidates, you're struggling just to earn a qualification that you can be proud of. You might have wrestled with text books and practice modules, but you've been disappointed. Worse, with so many study packages on the market, you can become bewildered.... and very frustrated. After all, if you understand the certification exam process, you realize that you're racing against limited resources. Exams are costly (in terms of money, time and efforts), and you cannot afford to fail too many times. At ExamREVIEW we know that merely reading the information does not equate to exam success. And there is way too much information! The rising exam failure rate shows clearly that the certification industry has undergone a fundamental change - you can no longer pass just by reading the regular "standard" preparation material.

In the past, exam prep is straight forward - you read the exam prep books from Amazon, do a couple of practice tests and then bingo. Nowadays, in order to maintain the "credibility" of their certification programs, vendors tend to offer huge Bodies of Knowledge (BOK) which make your life much harder by trying to cover almost everything under the sun.

Most of the study packages in the market organize their contents based on the entire BOKs. At ExamREVIEW, we believe that the BOK approach of exam preparation is quite unrealistic as it is uneasy to expect busy professionals who do not have the leisure time to go through 1000+ pages of boring yet heavily overlapped study information.

Based on our research and experiences, 80% of mistakes made by the candidates often come from 20% of the BOK contents. 

Think about it:

1, Why do books have to be written the BOK way? Because the publishers are not certified individuals themselves! Simply put, they do not really know the contents of the exams being covered. Therefore, the BOK has to be relied upon on as a framework for coordination with the authors (it is widely believed that the BOK defines the scope and boundaries of the contents).

2, Why do publishers prefer the BOK approach? If they don't come up with 500 or 1000 pages of information, how can they justify the high price tags of their packages? It is a typical quantity versus quality issue.

3, Have you ever wondered how a BOK is formulated? Most reputable organizations start the BOK process by setting up a steering committee for establishing the overall goals and directions of the certification program. Then, by working with a group of external subject matter experts (SMEs), an initial BOK is formed and is then further refined. With a BOK on hand, potential sponsors and partners are being approached for obtaining buy-in and support. Development of exam questions are then contracted out to qualified professionals, and after a number of review processes some of the submitted questions are selected for inclusion into the beta testing process. During the beta testing process, trial exams are run and statistical tools are deployed for classifying questions and assigning weights. So what does the BOK process imply?

• It is all about first impression. The BOK has to be broad and comprehensive. A 10-line BOK doesn't look good enough and should fail to gain any respect. Just like an academic thesis - a 200-page thesis for certain looks more professional than a 50-page one.
  
  

• Most exams do not cover the BOK line by line themselves. Just compare the numbers - can a 200-question exam cover a BOK with 400 knowledge statements?





• When writing a test question one has to ensure that the question itself doesn't look stupid and that there shouldn't be room for dispute. Simply put, it must be possible for a reasonably qualified third person to figure out the correct answer. Therefore, many exam questions writers write their questions with strong practical sense in mind - the kind of practical sense shared by most exam candidates who have real world experience in the corresponding professions. 

As a matter of fact, experienced candidates do not study the BOK line by line. They recognized that many of the knowledge domains include topics that are heavily overlapped with one another, and that many knowledge statements simply refer to knowledge that are hardly testable or simply common-business-sense based. Let us give you an example to illustrate:

You need to stop your car when the traffic light turns _________.

a, red
b, green
c, blue
d, purple
e, black

This example question tries to test your knowledge on traffic signals, which is associated with the knowledge statement "Know the different traffic lights and their meanings" of the "Traffic signals" knowledge domain. Do you think such a question make sense in a serious exam scenario? We believe anyone who has practical experience walking on the street can pick the correct answer.

The above also shows example of knowledge that is part of the BOK but is hardly testable. Interestingly, similar information is mentioned in the "Know the traffic rules" statement of the "Traffic rules and regulations" domain and is tested through a question like this:

According to the traffic rules and regulations of the United States, the valid traffic light that requires a complete stop is:

a, red
b, green
c, yellow
d, white
e, black

A real life example of the "common sense based" knowledge domain is "User Awareness and Training". Everyone knows that:

• user awareness and buy-in are essential to project success.

• early user involvement in the design process is a good approach for obtaining buy-in.

• user acceptance is critical and that sufficient training can facilitate the implementation process. 

Based on the above key concepts you can for sure answer all the "User Awareness and Training" questions correctly. What is the point of studying for this knowledge domain line by line? Here comes another classic example:

On which of the following would an information security strategy place the MOST emphasis?

A. Business goals and objectives
B. Technology plans and deliverables
C. Industry best practices
D. Security metrics

For any strategy to be successfully implemented, the number ONE rule is to have it properly aligned to the business goals of the organization (therefore, A is the answer). This is a very basic knowledge taught in the "Modern Management for dummies" classes.

So, by now, did you get what we are trying to say? Why "examprep" the dummy way? Of course, you may still pass your exam through the BOK approach. It is just that you'll have to spend more time and pay more $ to get yourself passed even though in reality you don't have to.

Frankly, most of the study products on the market are nothing but many hundred pages of instructions and useless practice material. They were all written like a textbook, making studying a slow and painful process that produces meager results. Even the better guides completely miss the boat- they try to TEACH the material, instead of TEACHING THE EXAM. Knowing the subject matters isn't good enough - you have to know how to apply the knowledge - most candidates students have already learned everything taught in these guides in college and throughout their professional careers anyway.

"How to Ace the certification exams without weeks and months of endless studying, using ExamREVIEW study products..."

Now, we know you're probably skeptical. That's normal and healthy. Let us give you the good reasons we can back up what we claim:

An unique approach to exam preparation

The reason some candidates do well on exam day is that they have made the critical connection between the material they learned and how to use that material to succeed on the exam.

The ExamREVIEW study products address the difference between merely knowing the material and knowing how to use the material to perform on the exams. To avoid wasting your valuable time, BOK topics that are heavily overlapped, too easy or hardly testable are not included in our TOCs. We make content exclusion judgment based on our skills and experiences both as business professionals and as qualified exam question developers.

We help you focus on topics that are often essential to exam passing yet often missed by other study prep product developers. We tell you which topics to pay more attention to, so that you can have a better shot at handling the killer questions in the real exams. Simply put, our study guides will help you plan your study and determine what should go in it. We help you through the study process (and help you study smarter).

This is how we create our study products:
1. We sift through the mountain of exam study information available.
2. We sort through the exam specific info and deliver the most critical study info you must know.
3. We analyze, clean up and summarize the study info for you.
4. We make regular updates to the study info based on user feedbacks and our own internal reviews.

 

Our materials are updated regularly to reflect curriculum changes.

 

Learn the Essential Bits

Packed with valuable tips, tricks, and lessons learned from years of exam prep experience, our ExamESSENTIALS Guides use an easy-to-follow point-to-point format to cover the critical and difficult exam topics. The strength of such approach is in finding your weakness - it is not the conventional concepts that you need to learn more about. It is the things that you find hard which require more attention. Our approach is to force you to focus on your rough spots. Through this means we'll help get you certified!

Our ExamESSENTIALS Guides are highly condensed: topics covered are summarized into concise and well written information that is easy to read and understand*. In fact, on most ExamESSENTIALS Guides the critical materials are compressed into key information presented in less than 100 pages (the number of pages is subject dependent, certain titles may slightly exceed this page count). To further ensure that you can competently sit the exam, each ExamESSENTIALS Guide comes with a list of exam-specific tips, a "what to know" breakdown, which study resources to take advantage of, web links for additional review, and any other helpful information that you would like to know. Therefore, you can't fail with our guides! They will teach you what you need to learn and make sure you learned it!

After you have developed enough understanding of the critical exam topics, you can enhance your exam readiness through the review questions we have assembled. Each ExamREADINESS module is a compilation of questions covering the major concepts presented in our study guides. To ensure that you can tell the correct answers by truly understanding the rationale, the review questions come with answers and explanations that are presented in depth. You will know WHAT is the correct answer and WHY such an answer is correct.

The latest addition to our product family is the ExamFOCUS series. They are concise study notes which aid in the studying of the most important technical subject. Targeting exams that are highly technical in nature, they save your valuable time - you no longer have to browse through a phone book kind of text book and take notes yourself. And you have no further need to worry about memorizing tons of information - you will be guided towards only the most critical pieces of information.

 

Product TOCs

To help you make a sufficiently informed purchase decision, the TOCs of our study guides have been reproduced on the individual product pages. You may refer to those TOCs for further information.

 

Click HERE for the major categories of certification exam we have coverage on.