undomiel wrote: I liken it to gyrating geckos.
undomiel wrote: "The Beast" is likened by some to deathly dragons. A minority say more like a fuzzy wuzzy kitten. I liken it to gyrating geckos. The difficulty seemed to be at about the same level as the XP exam. Anyhow. Passed! I had to drive up to Prescott to take this exam because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to take advantage of that convenient 2nd shot offer. Lots of driving and then they wouldn't let me take the exam early so I had wait around for 2 hours to boot! Oh well, still worth it to pass. Scored a 778. I got hit mostly with DNS and secondly with DHCP. Next would be Ipsec and then just a couple of RRAS and monitoring questions. Which is fortunate considering I did horrible at studying RRAS. One sim which felt more like a test on reading comprehension than actual skills or knowledge. The hard part of the test for me was picking up the little things that completely changed a question or an answer. According to the graph at the end I'm best at IP Addressing and Network Security and worst at Routing and Remote Access and Name Resolution. Which is kind of irritating to me because going into the exam I felt I'd do best on anything DNS. Study materials used were MS Press, ExamCram, Royal's sticky, and a lab consisting of several 2003 servers. Best recommendation I can make is to make sure you understand subnetting, know your DNS backwards and forwards, and hit those labs for as much hands on experience as you can get. I was still a bad student as I didn't really start studying seriously until this weekend. Definitely have to fix those bad habits! 293 will be up next but I'm not sure quite when, the finances took a beating over the weekend so it will take a bit to replenish the emergency fund. But at least I finally have an MCSA to show for everything. It feels good.
