Where Our Mock Tests Differ From the Real Exam, and Why We Print It on the Page
Most practice-test sites tell you their questions are “just like the real exam”. Very few tell you where they are not. Every certification exam on this site carries a fidelity disclosure — a plain note saying what our mock reproduces faithfully and what it cannot.
All 131 of them. Including the ones where the honest answer costs us the sale.
The clearest example: Kubernetes
CKA, CKAD and CKS are 100% performance-based. No multiple choice. You get a terminal, live clusters, and tasks to complete under time pressure. A web-based multiple-choice paper cannot reproduce that, and no amount of marketing language changes it.
So the disclosure on those exams says exactly that: the real exam has no multiple-choice questions at all, and our paper is a knowledge check over the same published curriculum. We could have written “realistic CKA practice questions” and sold more packs. Instead the page tells you what you are buying, so you can decide whether a domain-by-domain knowledge check is useful to you. For most people preparing for CKA it genuinely is — it finds the weak domain before you spend hours in a terminal — but that is your call to make with the facts in front of you.
The subtler example: performance-based questions
CompTIA Security+ is mostly multiple choice, which we reproduce faithfully: 90 questions, 90 minutes, scored 100 to 900 with 750 to pass. But the real paper also opens with two to five interactive simulations — configure a firewall, analyse a log, lay out a network.
Our mock does not include those, and the exam page says so. This changes how you should read your result: score 800 on our paper and you have evidence about the written section only. The simulations are still ahead of you, and they eat time you will not get back.
The one about our own estimates
The disclosure also covers uncertainty in our own data. Scrum.org does not publish domain weightings for PSM II. We needed weights to assemble a balanced paper, so we made an editorial estimate — and the page says the weights are ours, not the vendor's, and that a paper built to them may over- or under-represent an area relative to the real assessment.
The question count, time limit and 85% pass mark on that exam are the vendor's published figures. The weightings are ours. Those are different kinds of fact and we label them differently.
Why publish any of this
Three reasons, and only one of them is idealism.
- A misleading mock is worse than no mock. If you sit our Kubernetes paper, score well, and walk into a terminal exam expecting multiple choice, we have actively harmed your preparation. That is a worse outcome than not selling you anything.
- It makes the score usable. A result only means something if you know what it measured. “82%, written material only, simulations not covered” is actionable. “82%” is not.
- It is checkable. Every blueprint records the awarding body's own page as its source and the date we last verified it. You can go and check. We would rather be the site you can verify than the site with the boldest claims.
See it for yourself before you buy anything. Open any exam in the catalogue — the format, the domain weightings, the source and the disclosure are all on the page, free, before any payment. If what you read matches what you need, buy a mock test pack. If it does not, you have lost nothing.
What faithful looks like when it is faithful
Most exams carry no caveat beyond the ordinary. A practise exam for AWS Solutions Architect Associate runs 65 questions in 130 minutes against the published domain weights, because that is what the real paper is. CISSP is scored 0 to 1000 with 700 to pass, because that is ISC2's scale. Where we can reproduce the exam, we reproduce it exactly — and where we cannot, the page tells you before you pay rather than after.
If you are asking how do I pass a specific certification, the first useful step is knowing precisely what the paper is. That information is on every exam page here whether you buy anything or not.
When you are ready to test yourself against it, a Solutions Architect mock test pack or any other exam in the catalogue gives you a full-length paper and a per-domain breakdown of where you actually stand.