What practice exam data actually shows about certification prep
Most advice about certification study is anecdote - one person's route, generalised. The FigigExams Exam Data Lab publishes what we can actually measure from practice exam results: per-domain accuracy, weighted shortfall, and score and pacing distributions across CCNA 200-301, CompTIA Security+ SY0-701, CompTIA A+, Network+ and CCNP ENCOR 350-401 - alongside dated reference tables for facts vendors publish but nobody collects in one place. Every report states its sample size, its window, its method and its limits, and every report says plainly what it cannot tell you.
Reports
Which exam domains do candidates actually lose marks on?
In all three certifications measured, the domain candidates scored worst on was never the domain that cost them the most marks. Per-domain accuracy tables, blueprint weights, and the weighted shortfall arithmetic that reorders them.
What is a normal practice exam score?
The median is 50.6% counting every attempt and 68.9% counting only attempts worked at 20 seconds per question or slower. Roughly a third of "completed" attempts were opened and submitted, never sat - which means the bottom cluster of any practice score distribution is mostly abandonment, not failure.
I failed my certification exam. When can I retake it?
Every vendor's retake waiting period, attempt cap and repeat-fee rule in one table, read from their own published policies. CompTIA lets you rebook the same day; ISC2 makes you wait 30 days and caps you at four attempts a year.
How the Exam Data Lab works
Four rules we hold ourselves to
- Every number carries its sample and its date. A figure without a denominator and a window is not a finding, it is a claim.
- We publish distributions, not rates. Score distributions and within-attempt accuracy survive an imperfect denominator. Pass rates, activation rates and completion rates do not, so we do not publish them until the underlying record is clean enough to support them.
- Limits are part of the report, not a footnote. Where a sample is too small to generalise from - as CCNP ENCOR currently is, at three candidates - we say so in the table itself, not only at the bottom of the page.
- Practice results are not exam results. We observe what candidates score on our papers. We do not observe testing-centre outcomes, and we never present the first as if it were the second.
Definitions used across the Lab
- Weighted shortfall
- A domain's published blueprint weight multiplied by the rate at which a candidate misses questions in that domain, expressed in points of the real exam rather than as a percentage score. Formally:
weight × (100 − accuracy) ÷ 100. - Domain accuracy
- Correct answers divided by answers seen within one blueprint domain, as a percentage. Distinct from a paper's overall score, which mixes domains at whatever ratio that particular paper happens to use.
- Costliest domain
- The domain with the highest weighted shortfall on a paper or across a cohort. It is frequently not the domain with the lowest accuracy, because blueprint weights within a single exam vary by a factor of two or three.
- Click-through floor
- The share of nominally completed attempts answered faster than 20 seconds per question - fast enough that the candidate cannot have read the items. These are submissions, not sittings, and must be excluded before any score statistic means anything. In our sample they were 34% of all completed attempts.
- Domain-tagged answer
- One answered question that the stored question-to-domain map classifies into a blueprint domain. Unclassified questions are excluded from domain figures rather than guessed at.
Where the method is worked through
The Lab reports aggregate the same arithmetic that runs on an individual candidate's result. If you want to see it applied to one paper rather than a cohort, the method pages carry the full worked examples:
Add your own paper to the data
Every free practice exam produces the same per-domain board these reports aggregate. Take one, see where your own marks are going, and get a study path ranked by weighted shortfall. Create an account on the next screen, the code auto-applies.
CCNA-EXAM-FULL
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SECPLUS-EXAM-FULL
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