From: Howard C. Berkowitz (hcb@gettcomm.com)
Date: Thu Apr 29 2004 - 11:52:31 GMT-3
At 10:17 AM -0400 4/29/04, Peter van Oene wrote:
>At 03:31 AM 4/29/2004, Richard Dumoulin wrote:
>>Richard, this is what the employers expect from their engineers, being able
>>to find solutions even if the question is absurd. I believe it is also
>>required in the exam. Well done and thank you for making me learn something
>>today,
>
>What did you learn?
>
>Maybe it was how to hose up your network by changing RID values that
>likely causes way more harm than good. While I don't disagree that
>this might fix this one problem, it is a waste of time to try and
>figure out. If you had RIDs and loopback addresses mixed up in my
>network, we'd be sitting down chatting about reference letters and
>your need to prep your resume.
>
>I don't disagree that learning how to figure out things, and using
>technology creatively is a good thing. Who is going to argue with
>that. What I disagree with is spending time learning how to
>manipulate routers to suit test scenarios that don't relate to
>appropriate uses of technology (real world or otherwise) Spending
>time figuring out how protocols work when you set them up to do
>things that they weren't designed to do has very limited rewards. I
>personally think that the reason these situations exist stems from
>some proctors desire to make the test hard, instead of making it
>judge valuable skills.
Another explanation is that Cisco may have changed the test so that
an obsolete feature such as synchronization is indeed no longer on
it. Just because Cisco changed it, however, doesn't mean that there
aren't practice materials that reflect the prior use of the features.
People that failed the lab before, when synchronization was part of
it, might also still be assuming they need to solve it.
Of course, you may be right. Now, for other than CCIE, the test
writers are not the course authors, or necessarily technically
sophisticated. Does anyone know if the CCIE lab proctors actually
write the scenarios, or if that's done in another group? It's
frightening if a test writing group at the lab level was disconnected
from reality, but stranger things have happened.
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