Struggling with LINUX exam on LINUX practice tests — any tips?

Quick data point: I spent 9 weeks studying, 2-2 hours a day, and passed with a 87%.

The section on LINUX exam took me the longest to feel confident about. Eventually I just drilled practice questions until I could answer them without hesitation.

What testing center did you end up booking? Some of them have much shorter wait times than others right now.

Quick data point: I spent 8 weeks studying, 1-3 hours a day, and passed with a 73%.

The section on LINUX exam took me the longest to feel confident about. Eventually I just drilled practice questions until I could answer them without hesitation.

What testing center did you end up booking? Some of them have much shorter wait times than others right now.

The thing that finally fixed this for me was changing how I review the ones I miss. Instead of just reading the explanation and nodding, I'd open a terminal (or a throwaway VM) and actually run the command the scenario was describing. So if the question is about a file showing -rwxr-xr-- and who can do what, don't just memorize that it's 754 — go touch test, chmod 754 test, then su into another user and try to write to it. Watch it fail. Your brain connects the theory to the scenario way faster when you've seen the actual permission-denied message than when you've read about it.

The other trap with Linux scenario questions is they bury the answer in detail you don't need. A question gives you a whole ls -l dump or a piped command three stages long, and you panic at the wall of text. Train yourself to ignore everything except the one piece being asked about. If it's asking about group permissions, cover the owner and other columns with your finger. If it's a pipe chain, only the last command usually determines the output format. Most of that scenario text is decoration.

For the freezing-up part specifically, do a batch of timed scenario-only sets so the format stops feeling foreign — I used the linux 2 practice test and just kept redoing the application questions until the wording didn't throw me anymore. After maybe the fourth pass it stopped being "what is this even asking" and started being "oh, they want permissions again." It's pattern exposure more than knowledge at that point.