Well I'll be darned...

Alif_Sadida_Ekin · June 2009

I just passed this thing on the first try... Scored a 763. Not amazing, but I'm not complaining. I usually study for three months per test. This one I only studied for a little less than two. Then again, I did push myself to study a bit faster so I could meet the Second Shot deadline. LOL, I guess I didn't need it. I'm beginning to think that maybe the 70-291 isn't really the "Beast" that everyone says it is. Did Microsoft tone down this test? Half of the questions were ridiculously easy. Who knows, maybe I just got lucky. The last half of the test I did have some questions where I had to second-guess myself, and of course there were the select few that I had no clue what the answer was and just took a stab in the dark. I just expected this exam to be alot harder than it was. Probably similar to the MS Press practice questions. I seriously thought I was going to fail based on how I was doing on those practice tests. The highest I scored was a 67%. They go into so much detail it's not even funny.

With that said, here's my experience. I had 48 questions and one Sim. Like half the questions the Sim was extremely easy. Like everyone else I had studied DNS the most because I hear that is what's tested heaviest. In actuality, everything got an even amount of attention. I probably had the same amount of questions for DNS, DHCP, RRAS (know how to read a routing table), WSUS 3.0, and IPSec. I had very few subnetting questions, and the questions that I did have were not very hard at all. No subnet masks with mid range octets to work through. I felt a little let down in that area, because I actually started to get good with subnetting. Know how Services work, like where to find dependencies, how to specify recovery settings, things like that.

My main source of study was the MS Press book, two servers, and one xp pro machine as my client, Technet, and of course TE.

So, there you have it. The exam isn't bad at all. It's very straight forward. I remember someone telling me the exam isn't really hard, just the studying is. I concur with that. My head still hurts just thinking about IPSec and RRAS...

Now to knock out Security+ within the next couple weeks and then I'll resume my MCSE studies with the 70-293. Thank you to everyone here and all your insightful posts. I don't think the test would have been as easy as it was if it weren't for you guys.