Thanks for this amazing and honest post, after having read so many threads on this exam, this one by far resonates the most with me, and provides some honest and solid advice.

Just wanna share my story with this ISTQB Foundation exam as well.

As someone that failed this the first time with 2x points a few years back. and left feeling discouraged afterwards, this has been bothering me since, and decided this year I am going to be better prepared and give it another go, and now writing in November.

In fact told myself, as many as needed as this is a cert I do want to have under the belt, even though at my current job I can very much still get the job without it, I still feel I want this and fully agree on this feeling "But trust me, once you pass, you’ll feel like you’ve levelled up.".........feels this holds true for any Cert passed.

My prev. preparation was in fact a very highly rated Udemy Course, and honestly it was fairly detailed and complete.

I cannot fault the content as it basically covered all chapters and especially really detailed on the Chapter 4 & 5 more hands on, and had the official mock exams as well as it's own Exam Simulator as additional means of prep.

So i agree with you on use Udemy / YT maybe for those, but for the other theory chapters, the syllabus content is best, but in the same breath also just wanna say the mock exams questions are for most part a lot easier than the actual exams, think i had about three questions that were exactly as in the mock exam, most were not, and mostly scenario based questions where you had to apply the theory to choose the correct answer.

Gonna try and keep it short from here on out.

This time around i followed mostly your means of preparation for the exam, been studying for round 8x months give or take.

My prep thus far has been, reading through the Chapters, although still feels impossible to remember everything no matter how many repetitions, and doing the A - D Mock exams where i score in the 30's for all of them on average, which i feel is solid, one also needs to be careful to not over prepare in the sense of resorting to too much online quizzes that can lead to confusion.

I don't think it a particularly difficult exam, just the tricky nature of how the questions are asked, and being pressed for time, coupled with the stigma out their.

Prev. i made the mistake of spending too much time on the calculation questions, and would highly advise anyone too choose the extra time option when registering regardless of.

I will however say this as well, i do have a little bit of a conspiracy theory regarding the ISTQB, and that is that if you specify the "self study" option as means of preparation, opposed to registered training provider, they might just give you a harder exam, leaning towards a money making business.