From: Scott Vermillion (scott_ccie_list@it-ag.com)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2007 - 15:05:53 ART
Hi Mark,
Thanks for sharing your experience, as I doubt many from outside of Asia
have attempted the lab there (could be wrong, that's my assumption). My
wife and I vacationed in China a few years ago. While we found a few
things in Beijing interesting, we also found it to be a rather stressful
environment to vacation (for a laundry list of reasons, no need to air
them individually, just suffice to say that it was not the ultimate
"vacation" setting). So I honestly can't imagine attempting the lab
there. Honestly, when I went shopping for a lab date recently, I looked
at every single location *but* Beijing.
Just as an aside, I love Australia (Sydney is OK as cities go, but it's
everything outside of there that I most love), so I looked for a lab date
there first (any minor excuse to go would be sufficient). No luck.
Couldn't find one open date. But we'll see, if I feel ready before my
date in SJ, I may start looking for a cancellation there...
Sounds like your in the zone for a number on your next attempt! Best
wishes...
Scott
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Beijing lab experience
From: Mark Abrahams <mark@abrahams.co.nz>
Date: Wed, August 22, 2007 4:13 am
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Hi all
Just thought I'd share my Beijing lab experience with you all, as I
would have appreciated similar info prior to taking it on.
First, the history: I was a victim of the Great August 2007 Sydney
Lab
Reschedule, and so received a phone call from Cisco two days prior to
sitting my first attempt in Sydney on August 2nd advising that my
date
had to be rescheduled to early October. As I felt ready to do the
exam
at that point, I looked for alternatives, and the one feasible option
turned out to be Beijing. Thankfully, Cisco offered me an August 15th
seat there, but as travel to Beijing is quite a different proposition
than to Sydney (I live in New Zealand) it took a while for me to make
arrangements for this. Finally I confirmed five days out from the
exam
date that I was on my way to China.
There were a few challenges, at least to me as a foreigner, that the
Beijing lab environment introduced:
1. The desktop environment used a Chinese locale, which wasn't too
much
of a problem since you didn't need to use it that much at all.
2. The lab had only HyperTerm as the console application (from other
comments I had assumed that all CCIE labs used SecureCRT).
3. In HyperTerm, most of the keyboard mappings I was used to didn't
work. For example, no up arrow - you had to use Ctrl-P instead,
Ctrl-B
for back one character, etc. So I wasted time before establishing
with
the proctor that this was the way of things in Chinese HyperTerm -
and I
wasn't about to wade through the Chinese menu structure to prove him
wrong. Every time I reverted to using the arrow keys, the next
character I typed was also gobbled. Didn't realize how ingrained my
use
of the arrow keys was until that eight hour stretch!
4. Also, the Chinese notepad has no search-and-replace function. More
time wasted trying to look through the Chinese menus in vain for this
function, then trying to explain to the proctor what I was looking
for,
and then finally establishing that you couldn't do this. Again,
disappointing because I had learned from someone on this forum
(whoever
it was - thanks!) what I thought was a rather slick process of
harvesting all IP address from the configs and search-and-replacing
to
produce a TCL script and switch macro for reachability testing (very
useful these are!).
5. The proctor's English was reasonable without being outstanding.
While most questions were understood fine, some took a little longer
to
get through than perhaps with a native English speaker - no major
complaint though. Worst case, I had to use scratch paper to write out
examples of what I was talking about. The proctor was helpful, while
maintaining a professional distance.
6. The lab exam consisted of a paper copy of the diagrams followed by
the questions, all stapled into one booklet, with no electronic copy
(is
that normal for other CCIE labs locations?). Although I found the
provided diagrams adequate for most tasks (I did diagram a few point
solutions), I was used to having the diagrams on a separate
unattached
page so that I could view them easily along side reading the
questions.
I had assumed that either this would be the case, or there would be
an
online copy of the diagrams to refer to. Again, I didn't realize how
much I flicked from diagram to question to diagram etc. until I had
to
turn pages to do so. In hindsight, it would have been less
problematic
for me to copy a couple of diagrams verbatim to the scratch paper,
just
to get them on a separate unattached page.
7. The lab was _cooollllld_. The amount of typo's I made was
understandably higher under the exam pressure, but I'm sure the very
aggressive air conditioning didn't help as I felt my hands freezing
up.
Understandable though, as the exam was in the same room as the five
racks of testing equipment. And I'm notoriously cold under normal
conditions, so this probably wouldn't affect most normal people :-)
8. Lunch was nice but required chopsticks to consume. My chopstick
skills are appalling :-) Interestingly, we only had twenty minutes
for
lunch, and we sat in silence at our lab desks to eat (although no
work
was allowed during this time).
Despite all this (and although the list is long, none were major
impediments), I felt that I knew all the topic areas and answered all
the questions with about an hour to go. It was in fact with about 10
minutes to go I discovered a problem with one of my IGP solutions
that
may have lost me 6 points or more (poor verification strategy - point
noted). So I was flustered and rushed leaving as I didn't fix the
problem, and so this made me feel I hadn't done very well.
My reconstructed score ended up being 75%, which was obviously
disappointing, and I couldn't help but think that if I'd had a little
more time afforded by an English-speaking setup, things may have
swung
for me enough. However this is likely just me clutching for excuses,
and probably because I felt I otherwise had a pretty good handle on
the
test. Having said that, I still lost too many marks on things I
should
have either known better or verified better. And this is the stuff
that
ultimately needed to be more up-to-scratch.
So, back on the horse, and looking forward to wreaking some havoc in
my
next attempt, which will be in Sydney.
Cheers, Mark.
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