In the past, I’ve always used MeasureUp as my practice certification exam provider. While I was never dissatisfied, I was also never completely satisfied either. For my most recent exam, I decided to change things up and try a different provider, and I chose the Kaplan tests from www.selftestsoftware.com. Now that I have used both, I have a few comparisons that I can share. To be clear, I won’t be comparing the MeasureUp practice exam to the same SelfTest practice exam. I will be comparing my past experience with MeasureUp, which consists of 6 prior exams, to my most recent experience preparing for an exam using SelfTest.

Quality and Quantity of Questions

MeasureUp wins in a comparison of the sheer amount of practice questions they provide. However, based on my experience, I think I would have to say that SelfTest’s questions are better. That is a fairly nonspecific statement, so let me explain why I say that I think they’re better.

First of all, I have always felt slightly abused by MeasureUp’s questions. They always seem like they are out to try to trick you and require very careful reading of the questions and answers to ensure you are choosing the right response. In comparison, SelfTest’s questions were much more straightforward and simply drill you on your knowledge of the topics. The end result for me was that with MeasureUp exams, the focus was on their questions and with SelfTest, the focus was on the study material. Taking a MeasureUp practice exam was grueling and exhausting; taking a SelfTest exam, while still demanding attention and knowledge, was relatively less taxing. For me, this meant longer, more productive study sessions with SelfTest.

Secondly, for as demanding as MeasureUp’s exam questions were, once I got to the exam, I never felt fully comfortable or prepared for the real exam questions. After studying with SelfTest, I felt that the actual exam questions were much more similar to SelfTest’s questions than MeasureUp’s. This closer resemblance to actual exam questions is the second reason why I consider SelfTest’s questions to be higher quality.

Supplemental Material

SelfTest offers flash cards in addition to their practice exams. I found these flash cards to be a valuable asset in my exam preparation. If you add the flash card questions to the practice exam questions, now SelfTest offers more questions than MeasureUp. The way the flash cards work is like this: each “card” is a page with one question on it and a text area to type your answer into. There are buttons for revealing the answer, and two buttons for grading yourself on whether you got the question right or not. At the end of a flash card session, you will see a summary much like at the end of a practice exam, showing your self-given score, and giving you the chance to retake the ones you got wrong. I found these so valuable because they covered additional material not covered by the practice exam itself, but also because of the way they forced me to recall facts without reading from multiple choices.

Conclusion

In summary, I found several things about SelfTest that I liked better than MeasureUp, and I will probably choose to prepare for future exams with them. If you’ve never tried them before, I suggest that you do. I hope that you have as positive of an experience as I did.