From: Jason Madsen (madsen.jason@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 25 2009 - 02:21:38 ARST
Hi Dale,
I know many folks are saying don't worry about the questions and that if
you're prepared for the lab they will be easy, but from my experience they
were less "open ended" and more specific / quantifiable / measurable than
open ended. I don't want to discourage people and lead anyone to believe
that they have to memorize every timer, metric, and default value, but more
importantly I don't want people to under credit the open questions, do very
well on the lab, and then potentially fail the whole thing due to 4-5
written questions. It's a shame that we don't get access to the doc' cd
and/or the routers and switches during the open ended question portion.
After all, in my opinion, it's not always about knowing everything as much
as it is quickly being able to locate information via a quick "show" command
or else a quick doc' cd lookup etc.
As for "does that mean I'm not worthy of being a CCIE?", the one guy I was
referring to earlier felt as though he was slapped in the face. He learned
the technologies thoroughly and didn't fair well on the open ended questions
and in his grade report displayed zero points in "core competencies". To
him that read, "incompetent", which of course made him feel horrible.
Jason
On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 9:14 PM, Dale Shaw <dale.shaw@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Jason Madsen <madsen.jason@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > best case scenario is that you get a set of simple open ended
> > questions and have a bunch of timers, codes, metrics, and things in your
> > brain that you didn't necessarily need. i mean what can a devoted few
> weeks
> > focused on open ended question prep' hurt after studying who knows how
> long
> > for the lab portion? worse case scenario otherwise is that you devote a
> > year or twenty in lab preparation only, smoke the lab portion, and then
> fail
> > overall due to a few written questions because of not revisiting default
> > values, timers, codes and whatnot.
>
> <general rant>
>
> If I'm asked any short answer questions that requires me to have
> committed to memory the value of a default timer (or any other
> hard-coded value) I can discover in 3 seconds with a 'show' command, I
> will be bitterly, bitterly disappointed. I may or may not know it, but
> if I don't, in Cisco's view, does that mean I'm not worthy of being a
> CCIE?
>
> I hope that was just a example you plucked out of the air, and not
> based on an anecdote you got from someone who's encountered something
> like that in these new questions.
>
> Argh, that'd be the last thing we need -- more "memorisable" content.
>
> cheers,
> Dale
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