Boson & studying for CCNA

prettyby77

I read these forums as a lurker, but this is my first post so as to assist anyone else out there studying for the 200-120 CCNA.

I've been a Network Engineer since 2006 working on Cisco equipment through various jobs and I have an 1841/2960/ASA setup at home. I didn't have the need to get my CCNA over the years until my current employer offered to cover costs.

For studying I started with Lammle's book, which was very straightforward. Then moved onto CBT Nuggets, which was awesome for subnetting since that was my Achilles heel initially. After studying those, I felt that my knowledge was solid and that I just needed to get ready for the "test" if you will so I purchased Boson's 200-120 CCNA to get a real world feel of the test and the environment. At the first onset of using Boson, I was scoring around 570-600's. Mind you, I scored easily on Todd's sample questions in his book, thus I was really surprised by my initial scores in Boson. I buttoned up on the Frame Relay questions and sims, while also working on my other weaknesses (which were mainly nuances in the answers, versus not actually knowing the material). Once I figured out all the testing nuances in Boson I was easily scoring 800's randomizing all of the 200-120 CCNA tests in Boson. In addition, I would answer all the questions first without looking at the answers to ensure that I "knew" the material versus just memorizing the answers. Also, I utilized "simulation" mode over "study" mode in Boson once my scores were consistently above 800. I used Boson for 2 straight months and saved well over 15 exams that I scored over 800 but would still go over the wrong answers just to make sure I could shoot for 1000 in the real exam and be cool.

WHY DID I SCORE 698 ON THE REAL THING???!!! This goes to show that the comments in this forum in regards to passing Boson exams and your cool are wildly inaccurate, at least for 200-120. Some of the simulations varied tremendously to where I spent some time trying to figure out the darn sim in the real test and how it worked versus working through the answer. Then there was an ACL sim that completely threw me for a loop because the commands just didn't work as to the ones studied in Boson. Was IPV6 in there along with GLBP and EIGRP, yes it was. Testing areas like OSPF were almost non-existent IMHO. Overall, I felt that the Boson exams were somewhat close in comparison, but not a true representation of what the real 200-120 CCNA is like testing-wise and how the material is presented to the test taker.

Finally, it certainly did not help that the dry erase marker DRIED UP during the test so that I couldn't write notes on the supplied laminated sheet!

I will surely be taking up Boson on their no-pass guarantee....

mikeybinec

First off, you're in the enviable position I want to be in. You never know what you got wrong on the real Cisco exam--you could have read the question wrong, forgot that there is three answers etc etc. Yeah there is a lot of opinions on Boson, but mine sez that it is the best out there.. And I'll say this again--when I did CCENT, I swear there were a couple that were exactly like Boson. When I did CCENT I was sure I knew all the answers. But today I am hittling STP because my old Cisco Netacad material brought up spanning tree port priority to change a blocking port into a forwarding port. None of my current studying materials ( Lammle, Graziani, Odom, and Valentine) have brought this issue up and I'm worried that this could be on the icnd2. So re cover all your bases.