sweetjimmy
ISP
I passed my first CCNA in 2001, scoring in the high 900's, if I remember right. That was after going through the Cisco curriculum at the local college. Well, I took the Cert exam again today (it expired a while back) and I failed miserably.
I was more than a little irritated by this, as I'm currently in the middle of the CCNP coursework and I've been maintaining a 4.0 gpa. I figured I'd share my experience and hopefully have a few questions answered in the mean time...
my main question is... is there any way to skip a question and return to it later? The 'previous' button at the bottom of the page was ghosted out for me and so I assumed I was unable to leave the hard questions for later. As you're about to read, this caused me a whole lot of unnecessary stress.
in the first 15 questions, I think about 4 were labs and most others were focused on either frame relay or NAT... two areas that aren't exactly a forte of mine. My 11th question was, in a word, ridiculous. it was a sim question that looked like a collage put together by a kindergardner. It requires you to drag and drop network devices, links, and IP addresses into slots on the graphic, and then configure interfaces of the devices you place.
Had they just said "subnet these routers with this /28 and make it all pingable" it would have been no problem at all. 3 paragraphs worth of instruction did not make it any clearer, either, but only made the situation more frustrating.
The worst part were the arrows pointing from interfaces with IP's specified... after spending 10 minutes on this question I realized the numbers were not assigned to the interfaces they pointed from, but rather the far end interfaces... Of the provided drag-and-drop Ip's, none of them fell into the same /28 subnet. I ended up spending over 20 minutes on this one particular question... all because I had no idea how much it was worth and it seemed I would not be able to go back and answer it after attending to the easy questions.
This really made me mad because I've been through 1.5 years worth of cisco curriculum and I've never come across any question like this one. the format, the combination of drag/drop/configure, the required tasks themselves... it was completely foreign to me.
By this time, something else had occurred to me. I was on question 11, having already gone through 3 simulation questions...spending 5-20 minutes on each... as far as I knew I still had another 41 simulation questions to look forward to! At this point I only had about 30 minutes left and every time i looked at the clock, the subnet calculations I had written down all turned into meaningless jarble in my head.
I finally moved past the nightmare question, right or wrong, then was asked to configure NAT from memory on a router interface. What I'd like to know is how many CCNA jobs out there require you to know this? How many CCNP jobs, even? I know how to access information to do this but for crying out loud... from memory? dynamic NAT? Seemed a bit unnecessarily evil, to me.
So, the test sorta blurred at that point as I was trying to get through questions as quickly as possible after struggling through all the simulations. My nerves were a wreck, my patience was frayed, and I was furious because I knew I was going to fail. Answering endless sim questions seemed entirely futile.
Fortunately the latter half was a downhill slide, but even so, I think I was only on question 32 when I hit the 2 minute mark. THen I started guessing to get through it.
I ended with a 695. less than 15 points shy... There's no doubt in my mind had I been given another 15 minutes I would have passed. The last 20 or 30 questions were all multiple choice with maybe 1 nobrainer drag-and-drop. The ones I only needed 30 seconds to answer all came up after I had already run out of time.
I can't help but feel like I was cheated out of $150 with this exam. The only thing it tested was my ability to not suffer from a stress-related heart attack while trying to translate some sadist's idea of a good exam question.
So, here are my primary complaints about this CCNA exam:
1. the exam should start off with a brief description of how many questions of each variety you can expect and possibly even how much each type of question is worth.
2. simulations should be at the end of the exam
3. we should have the ability to go back to answer the tough ones later. Unless I'm stupid and just couldn't figure it out.
4. sim topology maps should make sense without having to compare 3 different router configs. Or at least the documented instructions should clarify the graphic...
Okay, I'll stop whining now. Of course I'm just mad right now and feel stupid for failing this exam. Had I not taken the 5 minutes to do the exam tutorial it's possible I could have gotten a passing grade that way, too.
I was more than a little irritated by this, as I'm currently in the middle of the CCNP coursework and I've been maintaining a 4.0 gpa. I figured I'd share my experience and hopefully have a few questions answered in the mean time...
my main question is... is there any way to skip a question and return to it later? The 'previous' button at the bottom of the page was ghosted out for me and so I assumed I was unable to leave the hard questions for later. As you're about to read, this caused me a whole lot of unnecessary stress.
in the first 15 questions, I think about 4 were labs and most others were focused on either frame relay or NAT... two areas that aren't exactly a forte of mine. My 11th question was, in a word, ridiculous. it was a sim question that looked like a collage put together by a kindergardner. It requires you to drag and drop network devices, links, and IP addresses into slots on the graphic, and then configure interfaces of the devices you place.
Had they just said "subnet these routers with this /28 and make it all pingable" it would have been no problem at all. 3 paragraphs worth of instruction did not make it any clearer, either, but only made the situation more frustrating.
The worst part were the arrows pointing from interfaces with IP's specified... after spending 10 minutes on this question I realized the numbers were not assigned to the interfaces they pointed from, but rather the far end interfaces... Of the provided drag-and-drop Ip's, none of them fell into the same /28 subnet. I ended up spending over 20 minutes on this one particular question... all because I had no idea how much it was worth and it seemed I would not be able to go back and answer it after attending to the easy questions.
This really made me mad because I've been through 1.5 years worth of cisco curriculum and I've never come across any question like this one. the format, the combination of drag/drop/configure, the required tasks themselves... it was completely foreign to me.
By this time, something else had occurred to me. I was on question 11, having already gone through 3 simulation questions...spending 5-20 minutes on each... as far as I knew I still had another 41 simulation questions to look forward to! At this point I only had about 30 minutes left and every time i looked at the clock, the subnet calculations I had written down all turned into meaningless jarble in my head.
I finally moved past the nightmare question, right or wrong, then was asked to configure NAT from memory on a router interface. What I'd like to know is how many CCNA jobs out there require you to know this? How many CCNP jobs, even? I know how to access information to do this but for crying out loud... from memory? dynamic NAT? Seemed a bit unnecessarily evil, to me.
So, the test sorta blurred at that point as I was trying to get through questions as quickly as possible after struggling through all the simulations. My nerves were a wreck, my patience was frayed, and I was furious because I knew I was going to fail. Answering endless sim questions seemed entirely futile.
Fortunately the latter half was a downhill slide, but even so, I think I was only on question 32 when I hit the 2 minute mark. THen I started guessing to get through it.
I ended with a 695. less than 15 points shy... There's no doubt in my mind had I been given another 15 minutes I would have passed. The last 20 or 30 questions were all multiple choice with maybe 1 nobrainer drag-and-drop. The ones I only needed 30 seconds to answer all came up after I had already run out of time.
I can't help but feel like I was cheated out of $150 with this exam. The only thing it tested was my ability to not suffer from a stress-related heart attack while trying to translate some sadist's idea of a good exam question.
So, here are my primary complaints about this CCNA exam:
1. the exam should start off with a brief description of how many questions of each variety you can expect and possibly even how much each type of question is worth.
2. simulations should be at the end of the exam
3. we should have the ability to go back to answer the tough ones later. Unless I'm stupid and just couldn't figure it out.
4. sim topology maps should make sense without having to compare 3 different router configs. Or at least the documented instructions should clarify the graphic...
Okay, I'll stop whining now. Of course I'm just mad right now and feel stupid for failing this exam. Had I not taken the 5 minutes to do the exam tutorial it's possible I could have gotten a passing grade that way, too.
