Are flashcards enough to pass CompTIA A+ on their own?

No. Flashcards are excellent for the memorization-heavy material — ports, standards, commands — but they don't build troubleshooting judgment or PBQ familiarity. Pair them with practice tests and PBQ practice.

How many flashcards should I review a day?

There's no fixed number — a normal daily session might mean reviewing 20-40 due cards plus a handful of new ones, adjusted to how much time you have. Consistency day to day matters far more than volume on any single day.

Should I use premade flashcards or make my own?

Premade decks save time and cover the objectives completely from the start. Self-made cards, especially ones built from your own practice-test misses, tend to stick better because they target your actual weak spots. Most people get the most value from using both.

How to Use Flashcards to Pass CompTIA A+

Updated August 2026

CompTIA A+ isn't all memorization, but a real slice of it is — and that slice is exactly what flashcards are built for. Here's what belongs on a card, what doesn't, and a daily routine that actually sticks instead of fading out after week one.

Why flashcards work for A+

Underneath the conceptual material, A+ has a genuinely memorization-heavy layer: port numbers, wireless standards, cable specs, command syntax, acronyms. None of that is reasoned out from first principles on exam day — you either know it instantly or you're burning time trying to recall it. Spaced repetition, reviewing a fact right before you'd naturally forget it, is the most efficient way to move that layer from "looks familiar" to instant recall, which is what a 90-minute timed exam actually rewards.

Take a card like "HTTPS port?" → "443." On exam day you don't have time to reason it out from "well, HTTP is 80, so..." — you need the answer to surface instantly, and repeated exposure at increasing intervals gets you there far faster than passively rereading a table of ports until it looks familiar.

What to put on cards

Port numbers — 20/21 FTP, 22 SSH, 23 Telnet, 25 SMTP, 53 DNS, 80 HTTP, 443 HTTPS, 3389 RDP, and the rest of the common set.
802.11 standards — a/b/g/n/ac/ax by frequency band and max theoretical speed.
Cable specs — Cat 5e/6/6a by rated speed, and T568A vs. T568B pinouts.
RAM types — DDR4 vs. DDR5, SODIMM vs. DIMM, and which goes in a laptop vs. a desktop.
Windows tools and commands — ipconfig, sfc /scannow, chkdsk, gpupdate, bootrec /fixmbr and /fixboot, and what each one is for.
Acronyms — RAID, NAT, DMZ, and the rest of the alphabet soup the exam assumes you already speak.
Printer maintenance steps — by printer type (laser, inkjet, thermal, impact), since CompTIA tests the differences directly.

What NOT to card

Troubleshooting scenarios and PBQ skills aren't recall problems — they're applied judgment. A card that says "step 1: identify the problem" doesn't build the skill of recognizing where you are in CompTIA's troubleshooting methodology when a scenario doesn't spell it out. Those skills need practice reps against realistic scenarios and PBQs, not repetition against a flat question-and-answer format.

The malware removal procedure is a good example of the distinction: carding "what's step 3 of malware removal?" → "disable System Restore" teaches you one fact in isolation. Actually being able to place all seven steps — investigate and verify, quarantine, disable System Restore, remediate, schedule scans and run updates, enable System Restore, educate the end user — in the right order from a cold scenario is a different, harder skill, and it only comes from doing full walkthroughs or PBQs, not single-fact cards.

A daily routine that sticks

Aim for 15-20 minutes a day, not a long weekly session — spaced repetition depends on frequency more than duration. Review the cards that are due before you add new ones; a growing pile of never-reviewed new cards is the single most common reason flashcard habits collapse. And whenever a practice test question stumps you, turn it into a card that same day — misses are the highest-value cards you'll ever make, because they're already proven gaps.

Keep each card specific enough to self-grade instantly. "802.11ax" → "Wi-Fi 6, 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, fastest of the 802.11 standards" is gradable at a glance; a vague card lets you talk yourself into a correct answer you don't actually know. If you can't grade it in a second, rewrite it.

ExamWizardz includes built-in spaced-repetition flashcards with per-section decks, so you don't have to build a deck from scratch to get started — examwizardz.app/tools/flashcards has them organized by domain.