From: Ben Holko (ben.holko@datacom.com.au)
Date: Wed Aug 22 2007 - 20:09:06 ART
Thank you for the informative post Mark, I WAS seriously considering
Beijing/Hong Kong, and even scheduled Tokyo.
Has anyone got any feedback on the Tokyo location?
Sorry to hear it didn't happen for you Mark, chin up :)
Ben
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
Mark Abrahams
Sent: Wednesday, 22 August 2007 8:13 PM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: Beijing lab experience
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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