I took the GSEC exam back in April. I do not want a repeat of what happened with that index. I was working up to the deadline on that index because I was busy with other stuff and waited until about the last month to begin the index. I printed out the index the night before the exam. I ran out of printer ink, which meant a trip to the store to grab more, then my printer took a long time to print it because I printed it in landscape mode. I was up until 3 in the morning getting it ready. My exam was at 10 AM. I had trouble finding things in the index because it was so big. It was like 300 pages long. I used it, but not as much as normal. Fortunately, I seemed to remember most of the material, so I still scored really well. The lack of time management is not a normal occurrence for me. I usually prefer to have things done well in advance. That date just kind of crept up on me. Good news is that I learned a lesson about proper time management on that one.
I'm refining my technique for indexing. I'm working on my index for the GCIH exam. I've spoken to others who simply write a topic and page number. I wouldn't feel prepared doing that. I still take notes, but I've taken the module section out, though. I find that I don't usually use it anyway. Now my index is just a topic, book, page, notes. I add the lab notes as well. I've found that some of the commands in the labs are on the test. (Which, makes sense, considering they say that ANYTHING in the books may be covered.) I started to implement a new technique: Note: You probably need to schedule your exam earlier than the expiration date. Make sure to consider that in your calculations. I should've have done this to begin with, but this time around, since I have multiple things going on, I calculated the number of pages in my books, and the number of days left until my cert attempt expires, then I subtract 14-20 days-to give me a couple of weeks to 20 days to review the material that I'm weak on. Then I take the number of pages/re-calculated number of days to get how many pages I should do each day, minimum. If I can do more than that, great, if not, I at least know that I will complete the index ~14-20 days before the cert expires. The same can be done with the OnDemand content to watch the videos in time. Calculate Total Vid Time (in minutes). (Total Run Time is in the Introduction Tab content. Convert the hours to minutes by multiplying hours by 60 and adding any remaining minutes) Divide Total Vid Time By Number of Days= number of minutes that need to be watched/day. (Make sure to round up if you get something like 15.876 minutes/day...).
So, for example, say you have 92 days left, 690 pages, and you want 14 days left to review the material before your cert expires. So, to calculate number of pages you should do in a day, you take 92-14=78 to get the recalculated number of days. Then you would take 690 pages/78 days. That's approximately 8.84615385 pages a day. Or, easier still 9 pages a day. To calculate the video time. Say you have 20 hours and 23 minutes of video time. Take 20*60=1200 minutes, add the extra 23 minutes, giving 1,223 minutes, then divide by number of days, which was already calculated to be 78. 1223/78=~15.6794872 or 16 minutes per day. These are minimum. If you can get more done than this-do it. This will help if something unexpected happens, like a family emergency, while you're studying and you can't work on it for a few days.
So far this seems much less stressful. I'll see as I get closer to the exam time. Hope that this helps others in their exam studying efforts. Good luck everyone.
Update: This method was a lot less stressful. Be mindful that you may forget some of the material in that time frame if you aren't using it, though. Note: Do not take a practice exam a couple days before the exam. I did, and scored less well on the practice exam than I hoped that I would. So, I was really nervous going into the real exam. Fortunately, the practice exam did not indicate how well I did on the real exam. On the real exam, I did really well.
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