The ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level (CTFL) certification provides essential testing knowledge that can be put to practical use and, very importantly, explains the terminology and concepts that are used worldwide in the testing domain. CTFL is relevant across software delivery approaches and practices including Waterfall, Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery. CTFL certification is recognized as a prerequisite to all other ISTQB® certifications where Foundation Level is required.
- No. of Questions: 40
- Total Points: 40
- Passing Score: 26
- Exam Length (mins): 60 / 75 (Non-Native Language)
- How to prepare for and pass ISTQB certification by Olha Kutniv
- Organized exam questions
- Extra exam questions on Github
- Mock exams
- Mock exams and glossary - Android App
I'm almost working for 2 years in testing industry and I found obtaining ISTQB certificate necessary for my theoretical and practical knowledge and of course, for my future career. The decision was easy but reaching the end was not.
Before anything, I started searching for resources online and if anyone has already shared his/her experience on taking such exam. Luckily found the experience of Olha Kutniv on CTFL exam which gave me a brighter insight on what I am going to face.
The first thing for me was, how long it can take. She says:
Speaking about time frames, intense preparation for the certification took me a little bit more than 1 month before the final test. I was spending about 2.5-3 hours a day to study, and that's counting only weekdays. This is not taking into account the fact that I took a theoretical course at Udemy beforehand.
Asking also ChatGPT, I found almost the same range. So I could adapt the results with my situation and predict that this exam is going to take at least 2 months for me.
In reality, I couldn't spend that much time daily and some concepts were not easy for me to grasp quickly and I had to review the source many times. It took me 3 months since the begining till the exam day, almost 150 hours of study :)
Anyway, the amount of time was not a problem, but I needed to make sure that I'm completely ready. I will explain how I got sure if I was ready for exam or not
The second important issue is what source should I study? I started with the book Foundations of Software Testing ISTQB Certification, 4th edition. It contains everything explained in the official source and also, complementary data which helps alot specially on chapter #4. But at the end of the book, I didn't find it useful for my method of learning and came back to the ISTQB official source (CTFL Syllabus 2018 v3.1.1).
I passed the exam with 36/40 correct answer means my score was 90% which is a very good result. Note that it is not mentioned on the certificate and but after the exam, you can see the results and your exam provider, will also inform you via email and you will not find anymore detail about which questions answered correctly or wrong, only the final score.
Before reading this part, I highly recommend you again read the experience of Olha Kutniv and then mine.
According to my experience, the sample exams you find freely online are very different than what are provided on the ISTQB site. There you can find 3 sample exmas which are standard and cover all chapters. So I used these 3 exams as my reference to assess if I am ready or not.
But for preparing myself for these exams, I had to do other mock or dump tests. So consider those as necessary preparations for the following exam sets.
I highly recommend, use these 3 exam samples wisely and don't take them all at the begining. Use them as way to assess your readiness for the final exam
- Exam set #1 - First month:
- After studying the official document and taking different mock exams (chapter-based or others), I took this exam. The result was shocking, becuase the level of the details and the type of questions are completely different than the free tests online (which are mostly outdated)
- It helped me to understand, I could not finish exam in 75 minutes and had issues with data of some specific chapters
- Exam set #2 - Second month:
- I focused more on the official document as my only exam source
- Tried more to learn from the mistakes, specially the tricky ones that two answeres are very similar
- Still the result was not what I expected which warned me to study more and deeper. Specially chapter #4 which is not explained well in the official document and you need to watch some videos online
- I used some tricks for myself during the exam to help me perform better and review better the results:
- The first time I was reading the question, if it was clear for me, I would spend more time on it, otherwise I would leave it for next round
- If I had doubt about my answer, I would put a
- (dash)in front of my answer to check it again in the last round (if I had any time left) and also after the exam, for checking why I had doubt about that question.In your ISTQB exam, the portal gives you the possiblity to flag the questions. So this trick, will help you in advance to properly find your way.
- If I answered the question on next round, I would put a
. (dot)in front of it, which I could analyze more after the exam why it was not possible to answere in the first round - In general, if the question was long or related to chapter #4 (which needs more time reading/calculating the test conditions), I would skip it and would come back to it on the next rounds
- My time management was like this:
- First time reading all the questions should not take more that 30 min
- The next rounds, should not take more than 30 min
- The last 10 min, is for reviewing flagged questions, and then others
- Exam set #3 - Third month - Two days before exam:
- Your first rival is the proper knowledge and understnding of the official document. After that, it will be the time which doesn't let you to spend much time on the questions and you should be fast. Two weeks before taking this exam, I knew I had to perform much better regarding time management. So I tried to do mock exams, not in 60 minutes, but in 30 minutes. This method puts lots of pressure on you to read, understand, choose the right answer quickly. How?
- Each group of 40 questions in 20 minutes
- Answered 500 questions (you can find it online) in only 2 days, I was sure that I can read, process, understand and find the correct answer quickly by just reading the question and answers only once.
- Your first rival is the proper knowledge and understnding of the official document. After that, it will be the time which doesn't let you to spend much time on the questions and you should be fast. Two weeks before taking this exam, I knew I had to perform much better regarding time management. So I tried to do mock exams, not in 60 minutes, but in 30 minutes. This method puts lots of pressure on you to read, understand, choose the right answer quickly. How?
On exam set #3, I had only 3 errors which means my score was 92.5%. This was a great news for me and made me confident that I'm ready for the exam. I could apply my time management techniques and easily review multiple times the questions.
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