Review of CertBlaster 5.0

This is a guided tour that will give you a pretty complete review of CertBlaster 5.0. If you have a CertBlaster license you can follow this review of CertBlaster 5.0 step by step in your CetBlaster software.

Release 5.0 of the CertBlaster exam simulator offers more data, more portability, and more accessibility than any of the earlier versions. This review will provide you with an in-depth view of the features that make CertBlaster such a powerful exam preparation tool.

To launch your software, click on the green plus sign next to your certification simulator. In this case, we are choosing A+ Certification Exam 220-1001 and so need to click the green plus sign pointed at by the arrow below.

Then click the green plus sign next to either exams or drills. You will then see the list of all the exams or drills that are available to you. Notice how each Drill is the exact CompTIA Main Domain for A+ 220-1001. This is how we make sure you only get relevant content. For this video, we are going into Exam 1 of A+ 220-1001.

Setting up your study session

Now, when launching our practice software, you will see that we have three modes that we can access: Study Mode, Assessment Mode, and Certification Mode. Had you selected a Drill, you would not see these options available. Our drills are always in Study Mode as no meaningful certification simulation can be performed here since these questions are focused on just one CompTIA exam objective each. So, selecting Exams will yield this choice:

Study Mode is the best mode to use to review questions you may have missed once you have completed Assessment mode for the first time. This is the most relaxed mode, since you do not need to use the timer, and you have access to the Answer button with both answers and explanations. You will also get a list of incorrect or missed answers, and a personalized testing plan.

Assessment mode is the first mode that you should enter since this will give you a timed experience, but you will not have access to the answer button. This will help you determine your baseline knowledge level, and once completed, you will get a list of incorrectly answered questions and your personalized testing plan.

Certification mode is a simulation of the actual exam environment. Timer and number of questions are set as per the exam at the testing center.

For this guided tour, we are going to select Study Mode, since this gives us access to most of our features. As you can see, once I have selected the option for Study Mode, you will see that there are some additional settings that can be applied to this study session. First, we ask you how many questions you want. You can choose to have all of them (as selected below), or a certain range of questions or you can choose to have a random selection of questions.

Next, we will ask you if you want to have a timed test. You can select no to give you an unlimited amount of time. Or you can select yes, and then enter the number of minutes that you wish to take the test. For this example, we are going to set the timer to 90 minutes.

Once you have finished setting up your study session, you can click on the green Start My Test button.

Now you will see we are on question 1. There is a lot of things that you can see on the screen:

The CertBlaster exam screen includes a navigation bar on top and some more navigation options in the left pane. The central pane includes a question in the text box and the space below is where you answer the question.

The top navigation bar

First, let’s check out the navigation bar. The navigation bar offers forward and back question by question navigation. They are represented with green arrows and will say “Back” and “Next”.

The “Home” button leaves the exam unfinished if chosen but takes you back to the Certification simulation page.

The “Reset” button is used for some of the interactive questions and allows you to change your mind. This applies to interactive questions only as they are the only ones requiring it.

Clicking “Cancel” allows you to exit the exam simulator altogether.

“Answer” shows you the correct answer and an explanation. As you can see, once you click on the button a pop up will appear and you can see both the answer and the explanation. You can also see if you have answered the question correctly at the very button of the screen. This Answer button is only available in Study Mode.

“Options” allows you to create a custom test based on your results at a prior test. This feature is only available after a grade has been obtained for the current test. We will go over this again later on in the video.

The “Help” button links you to this page

Right below the navigation bar, you will see which certification main objective/domain you are currently working in, and underneath that which sub-objective the question belongs to. The Personal Testing Plan (PTP) is generated at the end of a test based on how you did on that test. It will list your areas of weakness by exam objective and sub-objective as defined by CompTIA.

Left navigation pane

The left navigation pane shows you what question number you are on out of the total questions for this test. Right underneath the question number, you will see a checkbox that says, “Mark this question for later.” This button is useful if you are stuck on a question or have doubts about how you answer, you can check the box and return to that question later.

A little further down you will see the time remaining. This will only appear if you select a timed test, or are in Certification mode.

Underneath the timer, you will see a section that says “Navigate to”: These are the buttons that allow you to quickly move to a specifically chosen question instead of having to click on the next or back buttons repeatedly.

Next Marked will take you to the next question you marked for later. Next Unanswered will take you to the next question you have skipped.

Now that we have gone over all the buttons on the testing screen, let’s see some of the questions and try out some of these features. We can also take this opportunity to see the different types of questions that are available in these practice tests.

The question types

Our first question is an interactive one. This means that instead of just clicking on a button, it is a bit more… well… interactive. This type of question is a drag and drop question. You grab the possible answer on the left and drag it onto its correct spot to answer the question.

The next question is the most common question type you will see both in our practice exams and when you take the actual certification exam. That is the multiple-choice, single answer question. Click on the radio button to select your answer choice, and you are done! If you know the answer these are the fastest points you’ll get on this exam.

The next question is a Performance Based Question – PBQ. This type of question is one where you interact with a simulated environment in order to perform a task.

The tasks that are required can be vastly different. Let’s click on the green Start Simulation button. As you can see, our test environment is the Windows command-line interface. If you click in it, you will be able to type the correct commands to complete the task as required in the question text box. You can type pretty much anything here so be careful to get the commands and the sequence just right.

Now, it is VERY important that you remember that in order to have your answer accepted, you need to click the green Submit button on the right side. This is very important because, in the actual exams, you will need to remember to Submit your work or else the answer will be neither saved nor counted (all other questions are submitted and saved just by clicking Next). The performance-based questions are the only ones requiring this so that step can easily be overlooked.

Question 6 is another type of interactive question. This is a List and Re-order question. These are similar to our drag and drop style questions, though here you have to get the steps into the correct order in order for it to be correct.

Our next question is a variant of the most common question type. This is the multiple-choice, multiple-answer style question. You can tell since our radio buttons have been replaced with checkboxes. This means that more than one answer is expected here – that is also how it will work on the actual exam. You will need to read the instructions carefully to see how many are expected, or it might be a question where you have to select everything that might apply.

Now we are moving ahead a few and our last question type is an Exhibit based Fill in the Blank question. You fill in the correct information by typing out the answer in the text field.

Now, let’s see that Answer button in action. When you click on the Answer button, you will notice a few things.

First, you will see what the correct answer is. Right underneath that, you get an explanation as to why our answer is correct. Lastly, if you scroll down to the bottom you will see whether you answered correctly or not. We did not answer so we get “you have not answered the question yet” had you answered incorrectly the message would be “Your answer is incorrect”, and had you answered correctly the message would have been “Your answer is correct”.

CertBlaster feedback & reports

Ok, you have now seen all the question types that we offer. Now, if you click on “Next Marked” question, it will allow you to jump directly to the next question you marked for later. This feature exists at the actual exam and you should make sure you take advantage of it and mark for later any question that, on the first pass, you feel hesitant about.

If you click the “Next Unanswered” button, you will see the next question you, intentionally or not, may have skipped.

Once you have completed an exam and you click “Next”, it will end the test and get to the grading screen. First though, if you have any marked or unanswered questions you will see a dialog box appear informing you that you have marked or unanswered questions.

You can click on the button to view the lists of marked or unanswered questions. This is what the first part of this report looks like:

If you click any given one of those questions, you will be sent back to that question so you can answer it and try to improve my score.

Going back to the last question and this time not going back to any of the incorrectly answered questions but instead clicking the button “No, I’m done” will take you to your grades for the session:

The page shows you how many questions you got correct, and a graph that points out which sub-objectives that you did well in, and which you will need to focus on. If you hover the cursor over any of the bars in the graph your percentage score for that bar will be available to you.

If you scroll down to the bottom, you will see a blue “Print” button. This will allow you to print out the graph, as well as a list of all the questions you missed in the session. This is very valuable information since it will let you focus your studies on the topics that you missed in this session. You can even go back in study mode again and one by one view the answers to these questions to see what the correct answer was. You don’t have to print this as it is saved in the History feature (more on this further down).

Now, let’s look at the other tabs that are on the grading screen.

The incorrect answers will show you the list of just the incorrect answers from this session. If you scroll down you will see a print button here too, just mainly for ease and convenience if you did not print it out earlier at the bar graph.

The last tab is the Personal Testing Plan, or PTP. Here you will see the list of all the objectives that we missed.

This is also where you can create your focus exam. It will create an exam for you based on the questions that you missed. Just scroll down till you see a set of instructions. It reads, “CertBlaster can create a custom examination composed of only the questions you missed. This will allow you to focus on those questions you got wrong. Use this button to start a focused exam.” If we click on the green “Create Focused Exam” button you will be brought into your own personal exam with only the questions that you missed.

If you are done studying, you can also click on the green “Home” button to go back to the home page to select a different drill or exam, or you can click on the “Show History” green button. This page is one of our newest and highly requested features for CertBlaster. Here, you will see a detailed history of all your study sessions. This includes dates, timestamps, which mode you were in, your scores, and you can also view your detailed list of incorrect answers as they too are saved here.

Congratulations! You made it through our complete guide to CertBlaster 5.0. This was a lot of information to take in so we hope they will aid you as much as possible in your studies.