How we research

ExamTips covers 188 exams from 133 awarding bodies. This page explains where the numbers come from, because that is the only thing that should make you trust a site like this one.

Where each figure comes from

Fees, durations, question counts, passing scores and domain weightings are taken from the body that sets the exam: AWS, Microsoft, ISC2, PMI, NCSBN, the SRA, and so on. Not from a training vendor, a forum thread or another blog. Where a body publishes a pass rate, we use theirs. Where it does not, we say it is not published rather than estimating one.

What we do when a number cannot be verified

We leave it out. A guide that says "ISC2 does not publish a pass rate for the CISSP" is more useful than one that invents a percentage, and it is the rule we apply everywhere. Domain weightings must add up to the published total or be marked as not published.

Our career advice goes further: every figure in those 23 guides carries the URL it came from and the date it was checked, rendered at the foot of each page. That is 339 citations across 230 distinct sources, most of them government statistics agencies, regulators and published studies. You can click any of them.

Where we say a certification will not help

Several of our guides conclude that buying a certification is the wrong move: get the high school equivalency first, check whether a public programme will pay before you spend, or take the bridge job instead of a credential when your runway is short. We sell study material, so those pages cost us money. They are there because the alternative is advice you cannot rely on.

Corrections

Exam rules change and we will sometimes be wrong or out of date. Email [email protected] with the page and the source, and we will fix it.

How we make money

Every guide on this site is free to read. We sell Pro, which is study material for a single exam. We do not take payment from awarding bodies and no exam gets better coverage for paying us, because none of them do.

Contact

[email protected]. See also our terms and privacy policy.