Performance based testing is one of the biggest changes coming to CompTIA certification exams. If you’re planning on taking the A+, Network+, or Security+ exams, you can expect to see these types of questions soon.
What are Performance Based Questions?
Performance based testing requires you to actually perform a task or solve a problem to answer a question. When you start the question, you’ll be in a simulated environment such as a command prompt or Windows environment. You will perform the task and then click Done to complete the question.
In the past, most CompTIA questions have been multiple choice where you pick one or more answers from a list of valid choices. Multiple choice questions are good to test certain types of knowledge but they aren’t the best if you want to verify that a person can perform a task.
Imagine if the police or military tested sharp shooters with a multiple choice exam. It just doesn’t work. Instead, sharp shooters are required to demonstrate their skills on a shooting range, by firing live bullets at a target.
Similarly, there are many technical skills that can’t be accurately tested with multiple choice questions. Instead, many certification exams require you to perform a specific task in a simulated environment.
Performance Based Testing Example
In demos I’ve seen by CompTIA personnel, they describe a scenario where you are given a task such as this:
“You need to navigate to the c:data folder and then change the study.txt file to read-only using appropriate commands.”
You are then prompted to click a button to launch a simulated environment. When you click it, you’ll see a command prompt similar to Figure 1.
Figure 1. Simulated command prompt window.
The first challenge is changing the current folder (or directory) and you’ll need to know that you use the cd (change directory) command to do so, and you’ll also need to know the proper syntax. The following command shows how:
Alternatively, you can also use this command:
It’s important to understand there are different ways to accomplish a task because there are many times when a simulation will only accept one method. In other words, even though both commands will work in the real world, they won’t necessarily work in the simulated environment.
The screen now looks like Figure 2. Notice that the prompt shows c:data as the current directory.
Figure 2. Command prompt after changing the directory.
After changing the directory with the cd command, the next challenge is to change the file’s attributes from the command prompt.
You might know how to do this from Windows Explorer, but you won’t have access to Windows Explorer. Instead, you’ll have to use the attrib command.
In this case, you’ll need to know that you use a minus (-) to remove an attribute and a plus (+) to set the attribute. You’ll also need to know that the attribute you need to change is the read-only attribute and that the command used to change the read-only attribute is r.
The format of the command to set the read-only attribute is: attrib +r filename. The file name is study.txt so the actual command is:
attrib +r study.txt
After entering the command, the screen will look similar to Figure 3.
Figure 3. Command prompt after changing the attribute.
At this point, you have successfully answered the question. You’ll be able to click the “Done” button and you can move on to the next question.
You might have noticed that the attrib command doesn’t give you any feedback when you enter it successfully. If you enter it incorrectly, you’ll see an error, but when you enter it correctly, it simply performs the command and returns the same prompt.
In real life, you can use the attrib command by itself to see the attributes for all the files in the current directory as shown in Figure 4. However, supporting the attrib command usage like this requires additional programming for the simulation, so it might work in the simulated environment and it might not. It depends on how much detail they choose to add to the simulation.
Figure 4. Command prompt showing attributes.
In the graphic, you can see