The Security+ PBQs Are a Time Problem First

Every SY0-701 story has the same shape. Someone walks in prepared, meets a performance-based question early, and then spends the rest of the exam behind the clock. The version I read this week ended in a pass. The line was still in it: ran out of time to re-review anything.

The issue is arithmetic. The arithmetic is published.

The number CompTIA gives you

CompTIA's own exam details page for Security+ says a maximum of 90 questions in 90 minutes, a mix of multiple choice and performance-based, passing at 750 on a scale that runs from 100 to 900.

So, one minute per question. That is an average and not a budget. A performance-based question (PBQ) is a small piece of work with several steps, and one of those steps is reading an interface you may never have seen before.

Meet one early and treat it like any other question, and six or seven minutes can go by without you noticing. Do that twice, and you have borrowed a quarter of an hour from questions that would have taken only twenty seconds each.

A question you never reached scores zero

The scoring is scaled, so you cannot sit there working out how many you need. What you can do is notice that a question you never reached scores zero. So does one you skipped in a panic on the way past.

That makes the decision very simple.

The cheap marks go first.

Flag it and walk away

Here is the habit worth building before exam day, because you will not invent it under pressure.

When a PBQ appears, give it one read. Is the shape of the answer obvious? If not, flag it and move on. Work the multiple choice to the end of the exam, banking everything you are sure of. Then come back with two things you did not have on the first pass: the leftover minutes, and an exact count of how many tasks are waiting for them.

Now you can spend. Ten minutes and one task waiting is a very different problem from ten minutes and three, and only that second pass tells you which one you are in.

Most of the delay is the interface

What eats the clock is usually the interface. The dragging and the dropdowns. Working out where this particular question even wants you to click.

That cost is avoidable, and free. PBQs come in a handful of recognizable shapes, and each one has a rhythm you can pick up in an afternoon at your own desk with nothing riding on it, which is a far better place to meet a new interface than a testing center with a countdown running in the corner of the screen.

• Drag one list onto another
• Fill in a configuration
• Sort items into buckets
• Click the right spot on a diagram
• Put a sequence of steps in order

Never done one? The free firewall PBQ on this site takes a few minutes and needs no account. It is the same kind of task. Do it badly once at home, where it costs nothing.

The firewall task, since that is the one people dread

The configuration PBQ has a reputation it mostly does not deserve, because the rules that decide it are short.

A firewall rule list is read from the top down and the first matching rule wins. Nothing below a match gets consulted. That is it. Two things follow from that one sentence, and between them they account for most of what a configuration task is actually able to test you on.

A specific rule has to sit above the general rule that would otherwise swallow it. Permit one host to a port, then deny the whole subnet to that port, and the host still gets through. Reverse the two lines and it does not.

Anything you did not explicitly permit is denied at the bottom. So what are these tasks really checking? The order of the permits sitting above that line.

After that it is ports, and the set that turns up is small.

• 443 for HTTPS
• 22 for SSH
• 3389 for RDP
• 53 for DNS
• 445 for SMB

The objectives name the protocols that matter under each domain, which is a better list to work from than a printout of every port ever assigned.

The last ten minutes

Decide now what you will do with the last ten minutes. Ten minutes is enough to finish one task properly, or to half-finish three.

Take the flagged PBQ you understood best and complete it. Then the next one. An item you left untouched because you were busy being thorough somewhere else is the most expensive thing on the exam, and it is the one part of the score that is entirely under your control.

None of this replaces knowing the material. It is what stops you from being unable to show the material you already know, which is a much more annoying way to fail.