The thing about Security+ PBQs is that almost everyone walks in afraid of them, and almost everyone walks out saying they weren't that bad. Most of the best Security+ PBQ tips I can give you are about managing the panic they cause, not about some hidden technical trick.
Let me tell you about a guy I coached last year. He walked out of his first SY0-701 attempt convinced he'd failed because the very first question was a firewall configuration PBQ. He spent almost fifteen minutes on it, got rattled, then raced through the rest of the exam and ended up guessing on the last ten MCQs. He passed — barely, by about four points. Second attempt, he flagged both PBQs the moment they showed up, cleared the MCQs calmly, and came back to the PBQs with more than thirty minutes in the tank. Passed by sixty.
Same person, same knowledge base. Different strategy. That gap is what this post is about.
What a PBQ actually is
Performance-based questions are interactive scenarios. You might drag items into a topology, configure firewall rules, order incident response steps, match crypto algorithms to use cases, or analyze a log snippet and click on the suspicious entry. The interface looks clunky — it's CompTIA's own proprietary simulation software, not the polished stuff you use in your day job — and if you've never seen it before, the first five seconds can feel disorienting.
You'll see 3-5 PBQs out of roughly 90 total questions. They almost always appear at the very start of the exam. That timing is deliberate, and it's what causes most of the damage.
The one strategy that changes everything: flag them and come back
If you only take one thing away from this post, take this: when a PBQ appears, read the prompt, flag it, and move on. Come back after you've finished every multiple-choice question.
The math is blunt. MCQs take about a minute each. PBQs can eat 5 to 10 minutes apiece, sometimes more if the interface fights you. Both are worth roughly the same points. If you burn twelve minutes on an early PBQ while you're still nervous, you've just spent the time you could have used to lock in a dozen MCQ points — and you'll now feel rushed on everything after.
Skipping them up front does something else that's underrated. By the time you come back, you've been clicking through MCQs for an hour. You've seen the exam's flavor. You've probably already answered questions about the same domain the PBQ is testing, which means your brain is warmed up on that material. The PBQ you were scared of at minute one is a lot less scary at minute sixty-five.
One pattern I've noticed: people who've never seen the PBQ interface before tend to freeze — not because they don't know the material, but because they're trying to solve the exam question and figure out the UI at the same time. Flagging gives you permission to breathe. You can study the interface with a calm head when you come back, because your MCQ points are already banked.
There is one caveat. Some PBQs are genuinely easier than the average MCQ — a simple drag-and-drop matching, say. If you look at it and think "oh, this is a thirty-second question," just do it. The flag-and-skip rule isn't religious. It's about not letting a hard PBQ eat your exam.
Time budget
Ninety minutes, ninety questions. Here's roughly how I'd break it down:
- First pass through MCQs, flagging PBQs as you go: ~55-60 minutes
- PBQ round, coming back to your flagged questions: ~20-25 minutes
- Final sweep on any MCQs you also flagged: whatever's left, usually 5-10 minutes
If you walk out of your first MCQ pass with less than 20 minutes on the clock, something went wrong — probably you got stuck on an MCQ you should have flagged and moved past. That happens too. Flag everything you're unsure about, not just PBQs.
What PBQ topics to expect
PBQs cluster around the stuff that has a natural "do this" format. Over the last few SY0-701 test cycles, the most common areas have been:
Firewall rules and ACLs — almost guaranteed. Know your common ports cold, understand implicit deny, and be ready to reason about rule order.
Network topology and zoning. DMZ placement, where screened subnets sit, which side of the firewall a proxy belongs on. Drag-and-drop is the usual format.
Log analysis. Pick the suspicious entry out of a handful of lines. Look for timing anomalies, auth failures clustered on one account, weird source IPs.
Incident response ordering. Preparation → identification → containment → eradication → recovery → lessons learned. Memorize the sequence so you're not reasoning from scratch under pressure.
Cryptography matching. AES for bulk encryption, RSA for key exchange, SHA-256 for hashing, HMAC for integrity with a shared secret. Match the tool to the job.
Authentication and access control setup. MFA, RBAC, and the differences between authentication factors.
That list isn't complete and it isn't guaranteed. CompTIA rotates the item bank. But if you're solid on those six areas, you're solid on PBQs.
Partial credit is real
Worth saying plainly: PBQs award partial credit. If a PBQ has five firewall rules and you confidently set three, you get points for three. A blank answer gets you zero. A best guess gets you something.
This matters more than people realize. I've seen candidates leave a PBQ half-blank because they "weren't sure" about the last two rules. Put something in. Even a coin flip is better than nothing, and honestly, your "coin flip" after months of studying is probably 70% right anyway.
The mistakes that actually cost people points
Not reading the prompt all the way through. The PBQ often tells you something critical in the last line — "rules are evaluated top to bottom," "this server must not be reachable from the internet." Miss that and you'll solve the wrong problem beautifully.
Over-engineering the answer. If a PBQ asks you to allow HTTPS from a subnet, the answer is one rule. Don't build a defense-in-depth essay. The exam is testing whether you know the concept, not whether you can design a SOC.
Second-guessing. Your first instinct on a PBQ is usually right, especially on drag-and-drop matching. People lose more points un-doing correct answers than they gain by reconsidering.
Spending twelve minutes on a PBQ that you're clearly not going to crack. Set a mental cap — six or seven minutes — and when you hit it, fill in your best guess and move on. You can always come back at the end if there's time.
How to actually prepare for PBQs in advance
Here's the honest part: you can't really practice PBQs directly. No third-party study platform perfectly mirrors the CompTIA sim. What you can do is build the kind of understanding PBQs reward — which is conceptual, scenario-based, and oriented around why a control exists, not just what it's called.
If your flashcards say "AES = symmetric encryption," you're memorizing. If your practice questions put you in a scenario — "You need to encrypt 10GB of backups that will sit on an S3 bucket for a year. Which approach?" — you're building the muscle PBQs test. That's the distinction that matters.
LearnZapp's Security+ question bank has over 1,500 questions with full explanations, and the explanations are where the PBQ prep actually lives. Reading why the right answer is right, and why the wrong ones are wrong, is what builds the instinct to handle an unfamiliar PBQ scenario. You won't practice the drag-and-drop interface, but you'll practice the reasoning — and the reasoning is what gets graded.
One last thing
PBQs are the part of the exam that rewards people who actually learned the material. If you memorized without understanding, they'll expose you. If you did the work, they're the easiest points on the test — no tricky distractors, no "best answer" ambiguity, just a scenario asking you to apply what you know.
If you're not sure yet where you stand on the material itself, the free Security+ diagnostic is probably the fastest way to find out. It's about 20 minutes, no signup, and it'll show you which domains need real work before you start worrying about PBQs specifically: Take the Security+ diagnostic.