Passed 70-298 Today

TeKniques

Hi everyone,

I passed the exam today with a score of 946! The exam was pretty straight forward. I received 5 case studies with only two of them being pretty long with quite a few questions.

My exam covered A Lot of PKI and CA stuff. Over the past month I have been implementing a PKI/CA where I work so the studying/questions was a lot easier for me to grasp and work with while preparing for the exam. I also was hit pretty hard on securing communications between servers both internally and with mobile clients. I would recommend setting up a CA in a home lab and also configure RRAS as a VPN server to practice.

To prepare for the exam along with my work duties I used the Sybex book (highly recommended!) and Transcender practice exams. As usual, I thought the Transcender exams were harder then the real exam questions.

One thing I did not like about the exam is that on 2 of my case studies the questions were 4 and 5 respectively, but they gave me like 15 min for each one and IMO that was not enough time to read the case study and answer the questions. I was fighting the timer on each of those.

Also, there was something in one of the case studies that made me chuckle ... Not breaking the NDA one of the interviews was like "I have seen other people looking over the shoulder of other users when they login to steal their password, but it hasn't happened to me yet so I don't worry about it"
Yeah, I needed that taking the exam, I just kind of sat back and laughed a little bit. I mean, really some users probably do think like that.

Anyways, I have 293 and 294 left. Been studying for 294 for a while, but I am going to try to get them both done by the end of June if possible. Thanks for everyone's support

Ricka182

congrats!

SWM

Well Done. How long was the exam (time), did you need all of it? How many questions in total. Do you think it was easier than 291,293 etc.

Again Congrats

TeKniques

SWM wrote:

How long was the exam (time)

I got 155 minutes for the exam.

SWM wrote:

did you need all of it?

Aside from the 2 questions I mentioned earlier, I had enough time for the other case studies.

SWM wrote:

How many questions in total. Do you think it was easier than 291,293 etc.

I received 34 questions total and 5 case studies. If I had to rank the order of difficulty for the MS exams I have taken from easiest to hardest it would be:

271, 272, 270, 298, 290, 227, and 291.

SWM wrote:

Again Congrats

Thanks man

eastp

Congrats.

Nice score!!

Kind regards
Eastp

eurotrash

Congrats!

Olajuwon

Awesome job, man. I am taking that soon. Congratulations!!!

K_amisi

hehehehe congratulations on the score almost 1000.

skaeight

Excellent score! Nice Job. I'm taking this exam next Wed. I'm also reading the Sybex book (one chapter left to go). So far it seems good.

jkstech

good job , congrats

solo79

Way to go and thanks for the info... I sit for this one next wednesday.

About how long did it take for each case study? Are these like sims or just answering questions regarding the cases?

TeKniques

solo79 wrote:

Way to go and thanks for the info... I sit for this one next wednesday.

About how long did it take for each case study? Are these like sims or just answering questions regarding the cases?

The time frame each case study took varied depending on how much reading there was. The setup is not like a sim.

On the left hand side of the screen are all the contents of the case study. It starts off with like 'background' and then goes to more like 'interviews'. You read the whole case study first and then go to answer the questions. However, you can go back to the case study as you read the questions. There was one case study I got that was like 10 pages (screen pages) long, but they gave me 40 min to do it. The ones that were not cool were the ones with 5 questions and about 6 pages for the case study and only 16 min to complete it.

Good luck on Wednesday!

solo79

Can you read the questions ahead of the case? This seems that it would help in finding the information you are looking to extract from the case? I am not sure I am looking forward to this test... Thanks for the info.

canismax

Congratulations!

solo79, you can read all of the questions in each scenario, it allows you to go back and forth within a scenario, you can't read any questions of the other scenarios. But other than that you can go back and forth within the testlet.

The actual case is always there so you can go back to it at anytime during the scenario.

solo79

OIC. That was essentially what I was asking... Thanks

Danman32

I took the exam myself yesterday and scored a 784. I agree, the Sybex book was good. I managed to find a Syngress book on it and originally was using it as my primary book and following along with the Sybex.

But the Syngress provides too much detail that, interesting enough, you actually don't need for this test, while the Sybex book better prepared you for the format of the test. The syngress book also had many errors, and their web based practice exam had serious flaws, not to mention it wasn't in the same format as the actual exam. The Sybex book had form based questions for review of a chapter, but also had case study questions like on the exam.

You can know the technical topics very well, but if you don't have the skill to extract and process relative information among information that you end up not needing, you can't do well on this test.

I equate this test to playing an interactive adventure game. You need to find the clues to solve the puzzle, and sometimes the clues can be subtle.