Re: How to prepare for my August lab?

Well put.

There is a matter of confidence as well.

Doing a practice lab should be an indicator or howone might be expected to
perform on a real lab on any given day.

Unfortunately many graded labs are designed to outfox rather than to
benchmark.

I find that aspect of any graded lab to be counter-productive.

A good example of meaningful practice labs might be the CCIE Accessors, ASET
Labs, the Cisco Press Labs and a few other labs that actually tend to
measure by delivering a lab that is doable by an average well-prepared
candidate.

Even some of these lab stretch the envelope a little.

So if anyone is listening, this is a portion of the market that tends to be
rather underserved imho.

The argument seems to be that a "hard lab" that is probably not doable in
under 8 hours by a candidate would somehow better prepare a candidate seems
to be the norm... kinda like Lab 8 from NLI in years past.

Or stretching the language/wording to extremes where a candidate has to get
out the DOC CD and literally take the magnifying glass to find the comma or
the period in a sentence to figure out the exact answer that might be
required to meet someone's interpretation of a given task.

The lab does not do this to this extreme imho ever. Why do "practice labs"?

If you look at other test prep materials for any other subject, they are
usually on par with the test they are designed for. Not that much harder
and not that much easier. They are "on par". They actually simulate. They
do not inflate, nor do they deflate.

I think this is a very important concept going forward.

The lab asks for certain technologies to be configured in a given amount of
time. A well-prepared candidate can usually perform these tasks in 8
hours. A less-than-well prepared candidate might not be able to.

It's pretty straight forward.

At Cisco Live, I attended two hands-on labs - one by the proctor and one by
a vendor (the easiest lab btw),

Guess which one was more doable and realistic in the time provided (note it
did lack switching tasks due to the virtual environment).

Actually the vendor lab in question was pretty much on par with a real lab
except for a few things but for the most part covered the material in a
language that was acceptable in my opinion.

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Received on Wed Jul 22 2009 - 10:45:53 ART