This morning I travelled to Reading to take my CCNA exam.
The short version: I passed!
The long version…
(The terms and conditions of the exam mean that I’m not supposed to discuss the content of any of the questions, so I won’t do so. However, the syllabus is published and the mechanics of the exam is well known, so I’m not giving anything away here.)
I scored 958 out of 1000 overall, which I think makes it sound a hell of a lot better than I thought I’d done. One question near the start, which was a complicated “figure a few things out by looking at ‘show’ outputs” took me nearly 15 minutes to complete, and even then I wasn’t very sure about my answers. This put me in “time trouble”, because the whole exam was 44 questions in 90 minutes. I only persevered with the question because I figured that complicated questions would carry a lot of marks. At this stage I had become rather stressed out and had to force myself to calm down. Fortunately, there were sufficiently few ‘investigative’ questions later in the exam, meaning that I caught up on time.
The breakdown at the end of exam showed my percentage scores in each of the topic areas (I’ve abbreviated the descriptions here):
– “How a network works”, 85%
– “Switches, VLANs, inter-switch communication”, 100%
– “IP addressing”, 100%
– “Routing, routing protocols”, 92%
– “Wireless LANs”, 100%
– “Security”, 100%
– “NAT, access control lists”, 100%
– “WANs”, 75%
The above sections do not necessarily carry equal weighting. I think the last section, “WANs”, had four questions (two on PPP, two on Frame Relay?) and I thought I’d got those correct, but I must have only got 3 out of 4 there. I’d be interested to know what I got wrong on the “How a network works” section. I think I had to guess one part of a question about OSPF, so that probably explains the “Routing” score.
When you finish the exam, you click on “Finish Exam” and a box pops up saying “Processing exam, please wait…”. That box stayed on screen for about a fortnight, it seemed, before moving on to the “Congratulations…” screen.
All in all, I’m incredibly pleased I passed and very relieved.
Updated 24.07.2009: The pass mark given was 825, by the way.