Just took 642-502, simulations seemed out of wack

Just sat for 642-502. Though I passed, I didn't think I was going to.
The simulations, as everyone knows, requires you to mess around with IOS. (Like every other Cisco exam on the face of the planet). I configured everything the question asked, but when I did a "sh run" none of my changes showed.

So I repeated the process several times, still nothing. It was as if I never even logged in and touched the network device. A lot of times, the "no" commands didn't work when I wanted to remove an entry line. I was given an error message everytime I tried. Did this ever happen to anyone else? This problem reared it's ugly head on every sim question I had.

I clicked the "comments" tab and wrote a few notes to Cisco about it (included some explicitives to make it interesting). I hope the comments are seen by Cisco. Does anyone have an official email I can use to contact Cisco about this?

I was pretty pissed off. I went home and kicked my camel in the balls.

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Comments

mikej412

Congratulations!

Maybe they were all trial Sims! The comments you left during the exam may help the next person taking it.

I had a Sim once with an oversized graphic and a horizontal scroll bar that was one pixel high.

If you have some more expletives you want to try out, maybe Cisco's Certification Online Support would be another place to try out -- but if you are nice, maybe you could work out some sort of compensation for your "pain and suffering" instead. You never know, maybe you could turn it into a voucher for your next exam.

dissolved

hey good idea, I think I will sweet talk them for a voucher. I tried to schedule with VUE to benefit this site, but the testing center close to me is only open on saturdays. It's an hour drive too

This was prometric i tested with

Ahriakin

I just did the PIX/ASA yesterday and got a bit pissed with the sims too. It wasn't a major problem but they would only accept one form of the required commands. eg. a command to allocate an interface would not accept a mapped name (the sim did not call for one but this is taught as best practice) or any form of the physical interface name other than the smallest abbreviation. Inputting the full name that was stated in the problem text caused the command to fail, I got by it okay but if you were nervous anyway it would be easy to blow the sim simply because their software did not accept a perfectly valid command line.

mikej412

Ahriakin wrote:

I just did the PIX/ASA yesterday and got a bit pissed with the sims too.

Uh.... do we congratulate you?

Don't forget to use the "comment" button during the exam if a SIM or exam questions is flakey or annoying. They should have shaken the bugs out the SIMs by now.

dissolved

mikej412 wrote:

Ahriakin wrote:

I just did the PIX/ASA yesterday and got a bit pissed with the sims too.

Uh.... do we congratulate you?

Don't forget to use the "comment" button during the exam if a SIM or exam questions is flakey or annoying. They should have shaken the bugs out the SIMs by now.

That's what I did. Just keep your cool when you enter the comments. I'm dealing with Cisco Cert Support regarding my sim problem right now. The first thing they asked me was if I made comments LOL. They are going to read my comments and probably forfeit my exam results

Ahriakin

mikej412 wrote:

Ahriakin wrote:

I just did the PIX/ASA yesterday and got a bit pissed with the sims too.

Uh.... do we congratulate you?

Don't forget to use the "comment" button during the exam if a SIM or exam questions is flakey or annoying. They should have shaken the bugs out the SIMs by now.

I only thought of the comments afterwards, stupid I know, I was just so glad to be done and out of there I didn't think about it again until last night.
Got a 906 though so it wasn't all bad

. I'll do up a review of it tomorrow mainly as I've seen a few questions/statements here about whether the ASA and v7 software are absolutely necessary for the exam and I've never touched either (just plenty of experience lately with 501s and 515s running 6.3). So maybe a look at the exam from that point of view might be helpful to someone else.

mikej412

Ahriakin wrote:

Got a 906

Congratulations!

Nice review you did in the 642-522 PIX/ASA thread