I passed the CWNA exam today.
It was a bit more difficult than I expected, hence I scored a bit lower than I expected (82, passing score is 70, there are 90 questions in total). I got the book+practice exams+voucher ‘special’ from
www.cwnp.com (sponsored by cwnp.com
). The book (official study guide) is truly excellent, it’s well-structured and easy to read (partly because the topic is so darn interesting). You won’t be able to ace the exam based only on the material in the book, but if you read (and remember
) its contents you can definitely pass the exam. As we always suggest here in the forums, you should always supplement a study guide with another study guide, practice exams, white papers, etc. etc. There is a large directory with learning resources at cwnp.com, I really suggest browsing and reading some of the docs in it.
The reason I expected the exam to be a bit easier, is the difficulty level of the online practice exams, they are less tricky and difficult than the actual thing. It has 450 practice questions so coverage of the various topics is good. I scored 70-80% before I read the book, and after I finished the book, I consistently scored in the 90s so I figured I was ready. I had a lot of ‘choose all that apply’ kind of questions (multiple answers). While the incorrect choices on the practice exams were often obvious, the real exam questions really made me doubt a couple of times, as more than the required number of answers ‘seemed’ to be correct. Anyway, I think the practice questions are essential for a good preparation (at the time I wrote this, they are free when you buy the study guide).
Although the exam material is mostly theoretical, it does help to have some hands-on experience, especially with the different types of wireless devices. Also make sure you are familiar with client side configuration and utilities and settings included with the wireless LAN client. Another practical thing that will help to understand topics like active and passive scanning, probes, beacons, ATIMs, etc. etc., is using a wireless packet sniffer.
I found questions concerning site surveys to be the hardest. Although the chapters in the study guide provide good coverage of this topic, I suggest reading the templates from CWNP (join their mailing list and they will send links where you can download these templates) and various articles about site surveys (try Google
). Site surveying is not an exact science, opinions on what you need to perform a site survey differ but if you read a good amount of info from different sources, most of the correct answers to exam questions regarding site surveys will be common sense.
Overall, I think this is a valuable cert to have, especially if you are involved in administering or designing a wireless LAN as it will prevent you from making some of the many common mistakes. Apart from the interesting topics, the quality of the study material and the exam itself is very good and I think it will become known for that. IMHO there absolutely no truth in it being better to wait with this cert because wireless networking is still new and constantly evolving. CWNA covers mostly the basics of wireless networking, and most of those basics are unlikely to change any faster than other technologies.
Just to give an idea of how easy/hard this exam is: I found it to be easier than Cisco and Microsoft exams, but slightly more difficult than CompTIA exams (I only took the Sec+…). One of the best things about this exam is that they did not attempt to make the exam questions harder by using bad wording. So if you have the technical knowledge, you won’t be outsmarted by the exam writers
In a couple of weeks I’m going to start with CWSP. I’m going with the book+practice exams from
www.cwnp.com again as they served me well for the CWNA exam. Ten9t6, if you’re reading this, did you get those Boson tests? Are they any good?
Kevin, if you are reading this, I noticed in an older post that you said that a CWNA has to recertify after 2 years
www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2787 while I read at
www.cwne.com/cwnp/recert_policy.html it is 3 years. Can you confirm the latter? I also noticed the CWNE is for life, does that mean one doesn’t need to recertify for CWSP or any of the others either?
Johan
