Surprised Myself

To get an idea of what the INTRO exam might throw at me when I take the exam (not for a little while yet - i've only just started), I did some practice questions on the Cisco site. I've got some networking knowledge and I did binary / hex / decimal at school so I can recall that - just! Anyway, when the results came up, I was quite surprised. I scored 58 / 86 (which I believe comes out to 67%). If the practice exam is anything to go by, I need to know the OSI, WAN protocols and Cabling (and their distancing).

Seeing that has given me the motivation to move on (especially after being turned down for another job today due to 'lack of experience').

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Comments

Slowhand

That's always a good thing, to see that you're closer than you thought you were. Just keep chuggin' away at that training material, try to get some hands-on experience (or, at the very least, a lot of simulator time), and you'll have that coveted 85%+ score in no time.

Kaminsky

Have you thought about Security+ first ? Not needed for the CCNA but would be usefull to "complete the set" as it were and will help after the CCNA too.

mikej412

That's exactly what practice tests are for -- they let you know where you stand and give you an idea of topics covered on the exam.

The CompTIA Network+ overlaps a lot with the INTRO portion of the CCNA -- so if you have some Novell, UNIX, Mac, and MS Server experience you might want to sneak in a practice test for that too.

james_

Hi Aquilla,

I think the test you did on the CISCO website is a very good indication of what you should expect in the INTRO exam. I scored I think 83 out of 86 on there, and 950 on the INTRO, which in percentages comes out to around the same. Bear in mind, there are no simulation questions on the CISCO website test, but of course there are on the actual INTRO exam.

aquilla

james_ wrote:

Hi Aquilla,

I think the test you did on the CISCO website is a very good indication of what you should expect in the INTRO exam. I scored I think 83 out of 86 on there, and 950 on the INTRO, which in percentages comes out to around the same. Bear in mind, there are no simulation questions on the CISCO website test, but of course there are on the actual INTRO exam.

Are there any sites around where you can practice the sims or is it a case of just get as much hands on experience as you can?

james_

Well, I don't know of any sites, for the intro I relied quite a bit on the Official CISCO Press book by Wendell Odom. The book came with a CD and a whole host of Practice questions, drag'n'drop and simulation questions. They also come with a watered down version of Netsim with some pre-designed labs. I would certainly recommend the Odom books for CCNA, they are comprehensive and I found them easy to read. Of course nothing substitutes real world experience using real equipment IMO.

Hope this helps!
James.