6/7 Days until Finals.....Prepardness?

Nafe92014

Hi all,

This is my 4th time taking the Cisco Netacad ITN course @ my college and next week we have our Final Practical and Theory exams. I'm trying to figure out what to focus on the most. Last year on the practical, I got a 70% but feel I could have done better. Were required to make a crossover or a straight through cable and use it in the given topology by our instructor. I'm good with making Cat 5E cables but Cat6 is a PITA. The theory literally bombarded me pretty good (only got a 45%...60% is required to pass). I'm getting the hang of subnetting and plan to practice it every day until next week. Not sure what to go over for the theory, but for the practical I'm going to practice making cables and setting up a network with SSH and IOS backup.

Anyone have any Exam Eve/Day suggestions? My Practical will be from 3:30-6:30 on Thursday and my Theory is on Friday from 8:30AM-10:30AM.

rolando3321

I'm not familiar with the class... I'm going to guess it is a class to prepare you for the CCNA or at the very least the CCENT?

(did a Google and came across something about 4 classes to take before CCNA)

I look at it two ways.
1. Your looking to just pass the class
2. Your looking to pass the CCENT/CCNA

Someone PMed me the other day asking about the main areas of the CCENT that I took. I told him and will give you the same advice... Read the syllabus (or the CCENT outline in his case) and ask yourself, "do I know what this means or do I know this acronym" If you hesitate and do a "uh or um" in your head then you need to brush up on it.

Personally I avoided some topics in my training because I re-read it so many times and it seemed like such a high end theory thing that wasn't needed but as I dove deeper into my studies and learned about other areas of networking/Cisco; I realized that I needed to know those things. My last week of studying was hitting up those areas that I avoided...because I was afraid to fail and was avoiding what troubled me.

That said, not saying your in the same shoes, but I'm sure someone will read this and relate to it.

I will also say that I have had to relearn subnetting 4-5 times now. It was not the fact that I had never learned it...it was the fact that I never used it after learning it. The same can be true for many other topics in the Cisco umbrella. So be it an objective for this class or a certification down the road; if you see something like "make a router act as a dhcp server and set up a helper address" Well make sure you know what the commands are!

Cables.... I sucked at making cat5e cables in my networking class. I didn't need to make it to pass the class but we did get the chance to try to make them in the lab one day. After I had passed that class I bought my own 1000ft box of cat5e cable and a kit for crimping and cutting the cable. I personally think you should be more focused on the:
- difference between cat5a standard to the cat5b standard
- Know what cable is needed to communicate between various devices. I thought that a straight through cable was used between a pc and a router, because of home routers and whatever else reason; however, that is wrong. A cross-over cable is the proper cable to use, just mdix can detect the pin mis-configuration and make it work. Thou I have sound many devices that the mdix gets messed up and communication stops, so I avoid relying on this at all cost.

And yes, cat6 sucks to terminate.