This morning I travelled to Reading to take my CCNA exam.<\/p>\n
The short version: I passed!<\/p>\n
The long version…<\/p>\n
(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.)<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The breakdown at the end of exam showed my percentage scores in each of the topic areas (I’ve abbreviated the descriptions here):<\/p>\n
– “How a network works”, 85%
\n– “Switches, VLANs, inter-switch communication”, 100%
\n– “IP addressing”, 100%
\n– “Routing, routing protocols”, 92%
\n– “Wireless LANs”, 100%
\n– “Security”, 100%
\n– “NAT, access control lists”, 100%
\n– “WANs”, 75%<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
All in all, I’m incredibly pleased I passed and very relieved.<\/p>\n
Updated 24.07.2009<\/strong>: The pass mark given was 825, by the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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… (read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":460,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/460"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}