A practice test is only useful if it fails you before CompTIA does
Most people use practice tests backwards. They work through a question bank until the score looks reassuring, book the exam, and then get surprised by a performance-based question about a printer that will not authenticate. The score was never the point. A practice test earns its keep by finding the topics you are quietly weak on while it is still cheap to be wrong.
This guide covers what the CompTIA A+ exams actually test, how to use a practice test so it predicts your real result instead of flattering you, and where to sit a full-length one for free.
What the A+ exams actually look like
A+ is not one exam. It is two, and you need both to be certified: Core 1 (220-1101) and Core 2 (220-1102). They are sat separately, scored separately, and failing one does not erase the other.
- Questions: up to 90 per exam
- Time: 90 minutes per exam
- Passing score: 675 out of 900 for Core 1, 700 out of 900 for Core 2
- Question types: multiple choice, drag-and-drop, and performance-based questions (PBQs)
Two details matter more than the rest. First, the scale is 900 points and it is not a simple percentage. Questions are weighted, so "I got 70% right" does not map cleanly to a pass. Second, PBQs usually appear at the start. They are slow, they are worth more, and candidates routinely burn twenty minutes on the first three questions and then rush the remaining eighty. If you take nothing else from this article: in your practice runs, learn to flag a PBQ and come back to it.
Core 1 and Core 2 need different practice habits
Treating them as one blob of content is the most common preparation mistake.
Core 1 is physical and diagnostic. Hardware, mobile devices, networking, virtualisation, and a heavy troubleshooting domain. The questions tend to describe a symptom and ask for the most likely cause or the correct next step. You are being tested on whether you can reason about a machine you cannot see.
Core 2 is procedural and situational. Operating systems, security, software troubleshooting, and operational procedures. More of it is memorisation, covering command syntax, Windows settings paths and permission models, but a meaningful chunk is judgement: what a technician should do, in what order, and what they should never do.
The practical consequence: Core 1 rewards working through varied scenarios, because pattern recognition is the skill. Core 2 rewards spaced repetition on the memorisation blocks, then scenario work on top. Same certification, two genuinely different study rhythms.
What a real A+ question feels like
Textbook questions ask "what does DDR4 stand for." Exam questions do not. Here is the shape of the thing, drawn from the kind of scenarios in our own A+ bank:
- A technician is upgrading a small office desktop that currently has one 8 GB DDR4-2666 DIMM installed. What should they check before ordering a second module?
- A user drops a smartphone and the display glass is cracked, but the image still appears normally. What has actually failed?
- A user reports that their laptop suddenly types numbers when they press certain letter keys.
- A three-year-old business laptop shuts down unexpectedly under load.
- A new multifunction printer must authenticate users before releasing print jobs.
Notice what these have in common. None of them can be answered by recalling a definition. Each describes a situation and asks you to isolate a cause or choose a next action. The cracked-screen question is a good example of the trap: glass and digitiser and LCD are three different components, and "the image still appears normally" is the clue that tells you which one survived. A practice test that only quizzes you on terminology will not prepare you for that sentence.
How to score yourself honestly
Here is the method that separates a useful practice test from an expensive comfort blanket.
- Sit the first one cold and full-length. No notes, no pausing, 90 minutes on a timer. The number will be bad. That is the point, because it is your baseline, and it is the only score you will get that is not contaminated by familiarity with the questions.
- Categorise every wrong answer. Not "I got 23 wrong" but why: didn't know it, misread the question, knew it but ran out of time, or narrowed to two and guessed. These four failures have four different fixes, and only the first one is solved by more studying.
- Review the questions you got right but guessed. Almost nobody does this. A lucky guess is a gap that your score is actively hiding from you.
- Re-test on a different question set, not the same one. Re-running an identical test measures recall of that test, not readiness for the exam.
On retaking, it works, and by a wider margin than most people expect. Looking at attempts across our own platform, learners who sat a second attempt improved by roughly fifteen percentage points on average over their first, and were around twice as likely to eventually pass as they were on their first try. The first attempt is not a verdict. It is diagnostic data, and treating it that way is most of the technique.
Four mistakes that cost people the exam
Chasing a percentage instead of coverage. Scoring 85% on the same 60 questions repeatedly tells you nothing. Breadth across all domains beats a high score on a narrow slice.
Skipping the performance-based questions in practice. They are the slowest and least comfortable part, so they are the part people skip, and then meet for the first time under exam conditions, first thing, with the clock running.
Studying Core 1 and Core 2 simultaneously. The content interferes. Most people do better taking Core 1, passing it, then starting Core 2 with a clean head.
Using dumps. Beyond the fact that they violate CompTIA's candidate agreement and can void your certification, they train the wrong reflex, which is recognising a question you have seen before rather than reasoning about a situation you have not. CompTIA rotates its item bank. The reasoning transfers; the memorised answer key does not.
Practise free, then decide when you are ready
We host free full-length A+ practice exams, with 471 questions for Core 1 and 828 for Core 2, written against the current exam objectives, with an explanation attached to every answer. No signup wall, and the timer matches the real thing at 90 questions in 90 minutes.
A reasonable readiness signal: two consecutive full-length attempts, on different question sets, comfortably above the passing threshold, with no domain sitting far below your average. If one domain is dragging, that is where the next week goes.
Once A+ is done, the usual next steps are Network+ if you are heading toward infrastructure or Security+ if you are heading toward security. Both build directly on what Core 1 and Core 2 established.