Intro on Friday morning - Update: Passed!!

Knives Out

So I postponed my intro exam by a couple weeks and my test is on Friday at 9am sharp.

Any tips? Besides the obvious "relax"... I have been a nervous wreck the past day or so and know I should calm down..

Should I arrive early? how early? what is the passing score, 800?

Paul Boz

Just chill out. It's not like failing it is the end of the world. Just pony up the funds to take it again if you fail it. Seriously, go into the exam with the mindset of "plenty of people fail this, and if I fail it I can re-take it whenever I'm ready."

You may want to focus on your subnetting skills, what type of cabling you need to connect various devices, what broadcast and collision domains are what what routers and switches do to each, and other basic information about the Cisco router and switch hardware and operating system. These are all topics found in the exam blueprint.

mikej412

Time Management -- keep an eye on the clock. Whenever we forget to remind people about that, it seems someone then run out of time.

ramjet666

mikej412 wrote:

Time Management -- keep an eye on the clock. Whenever we forget to remind people about that, it seems someone then run out of time.

Trouble is as I found out depending on how the exam wants to throw its questions at you makes it hard to try and judge time left. As I had tough questions in the beginning that took alot of time to work out. This then left me with relatively little time to finish. But I then had a run of quick fire questions. And it panned out ok. Its a hard one to judge.

I think Cisco must give each question a fair amount of time to answer. And calculate exam time on this. If you get a nasty one and work it out realise its wrong and then have to re-work it, then you're starting to burn time allocated to other questions.

The more subnetting math info you can keep in you head the better. This helps with speed.
Also write out the powers of 2 on your board as well as CIDR's. (I didn't as could not remember them so have to work them out each time!).

The sim questions for me eat up most of my time.

Arrive in good time, about 1/2 an hour before test time. Try to relax.

I think pass score is subject to NDA? So can't say.

Good luck!

Tricon7

Knives Out wrote:

So I postponed my intro exam by a couple weeks and my test is on Friday at 9am sharp.

Any tips? Besides the obvious "relax"... I have been a nervous wreck the past day or so and know I should calm down..

Should I arrive early? how early? what is the passing score, 800?

If you get any simulations, they can eat you up for time. You might want to give yourself, say, 10 minutes for it and pace yourself so you don't go over. It's easy to run out of time and have to frantically race to beat the clock and finish.

Subnetting is a major part of CCNA so know it well. Best of luck (better than mine, anyway). Let us know how you do.

kafifi13

Make sure any Subnetting formulas you memorized you write down on the scrap paper.

widjerd

Make sure you are up together on your show commands ie
show controller serial0/0
show ip route
show run

and config registers

0x2102 Boots normally
0x2142 Boots ignoring NVRAM
0x2100 Boot to ROMMON

good luck

iproute

Instead of giving you clues on what to study, I'll just give you some advice based on my ICND test. The Intro went with ease for me and I didn't really run into any of the issues below.

- Make sure your marker is in good health - on the ICND mine ran dry about half way through.
- Don't accidentally erase your marker board with your arm, sleeve, etc. - on the ICND my writing was coming off very easily, it's as if I could have blown on it and the text would have faded away.
- Try to use only one side of the marker board as flipping it over may cause text to become garbled.
- In conflict with the last point - write large. The marker I had was anything but precise. I could have used the entire side for my subnet table alone. On more than one occasion I had to re-write the table during the test.
- Don't blow insane amounts of time trying to double, triple, quadruple check your answers.
- If you get a big time consuming sim question at the beginning, try not to let it freak you out. It will make your remaining time seem very small though. This problem is most unavoidable.
- Pace yourself. If you get a time hog question early on, it's going to have the natural effect of making you move much faster. However, if you get down to the last question with 2 minutes to go and it happens to be the time hog (I blew 15-17 minutes on one question) you're going to turn . While you don't want to rush too much, you shouldn't treat it like a stroll in the park either.

I had the extra stress of having my company pay for the tests. If I had failed, I would have never heard the end of it. Don't let anyone pay for your tests unless you're ready to hear that kind of crap .

dtlokee

Remember to write down your subnetting info before you begin the exam (take 5 minutes to write down things like the binary and decimal values of subnet masks and their associated increments, et al)

If you need more than 1 note board, just ask they should give them to you.

I attack the questions by eliminating the incorrect answer choices and choosing from whatever's remaining. This does not work all the time but on many questions you can increase you odds by eliminating the incorrect choices (1 out of 2 instead of 1 out of 5)

Good luck tomorrow

tech-airman

Some practical tips that weren't mentioned:

1. Ask for a napkin or paper towel you can use as a whiteboard eraser. Then, after each question, since you can't go back, go ahead and erase the whiteboard and start with a clean slate. There is NO point in "saving your work" for previous questions.
2. Also, feel free to write big enough you can read it. I made the mistake of trying to write bits and numbers in the tiny single squares with the relatively bushy tipped whiteboard marker and then couldn't read my own handwriting.
3. I used one side of the whiteboard for the mathematical calculations and the other side for drawing things like physical and/or logical topologies.

Good luck tomorrow.

iproute

How did it go?

Knives Out

passed with a 912 or 916!

There was some technical difficulty with printing out my test score sheet so I have to stop by and pick it up later.

Had minor problems with a simulator, but it turns out I may have misinterpreted the instructions.

Whatever the exact score was, I passed

rjbarlow

Congrats man, beautiful score!

iproute

Knives Out wrote:

passed with a 912 or 916!

There was some technical difficulty with printing out my test score sheet so I have to stop by and pick it up later.

Had minor problems with a simulator, but it turns out I may have misinterpreted the instructions.

Whatever the exact score was, I passed

Congrats

MrBogs

Congrats bro...I hope you can share some of your exp. and taking the exam... Im planing to take CCNA..