Hitting a wall

bermovick

So I've been studying for route for ... I don't know; something like 6 months now and I feel like I've hit a wall. I've gone through both the FLG (first) and the OCG (just finishing up ipv6 in), and for most of the ocg I was pretty confident I knew what the book was talking about. It solidified a few things I wasn't sure on, but for the most part I "knew" it.

But when I take the practice test that comes with the OCG, I ... can't ... quite ... pass. I'm pulling 740-760s (which was the same scores I was getting pre-OCG). I'm getting hung up on some of the specifics (stupid mistakes, one could say - like the order of the arguments of a command), which really knocks out my confidence that I'm ready to schedule.

Has anyone else encountered this? How'd you react/overcome? Any other suggestions? At $200 per sitting I just don't want to risk throwing the money away by not being prepared, but I'm not sure how else to prepare at this point. I've thought about just skimming through the book(s), doing labs again, but I'm not sure how many times I can repeat the same lab over and over before I could say "yeah, it's ip summary-address eigrp, not ip eigrp summary-address. ... or ... shoot, I'm not sure if that's right (I think so though...)

vinbuck

The practice test that comes with the OCG is not as hard as the ROUTE exam, so I would probably tell you to hold off on taking ROUTE for a while. What are you using for labs?

bermovick

I just kindof make up my own, doing whatever I'm reading about in the book to see it "in action"

SharkDiver

I always do as many practice questions as I can find.

For the CCNP SWITCH and CCNP ROUTE exams, I used the free questions that came with the OCG, I bought the Boson ExSim-Max questions and I bought the Transcender questions. I did all of them until I could score 100% everytime, and I still saw things on the real exam that I hadn't seen before.

Good Luck.

vinbuck

bermovick wrote: »

I just kindof make up my own, doing whatever I'm reading about in the book to see it "in action"

Absolutely nothing wrong with that, however check out the free Cisco NetAcademy lab manual for ROUTE. It will change the way you look at labs. With the CCNP, it's not enough to know how to make something work. You are expected to know different methods of enabling the same service and multiple ways of verifying it. I labbed everything in the FLG several times, but if I hadn't used the Cisco lab manual to study, I doubt I would have passed.

http://www.techexams.net/forums/ccnp/71743-free-study-materials.html

nel

theres some good tips by people here. The reason i believe i passed the route first time was due to the OTT labbing i had completed. This was a combo of the lab manual and GNS3vaults. Plus a few i made up.

I have never used the practice questions as i usually feel these rarely correlate to the exam imo. Obviously i cant go into detail but alot of my questions related or could be answered from the sheer amount of labbing i had completed. You need to be familiar with not only how it works but also how to configure it, how to show the operations and whats going on and how to debug it. for example, follow this kind of plan.

1) learn theory
2) configure, configure, configure.
3) verify - show commands. Understand the output and whats going on!
4) destroy - troubleshoot using debugs, logs and show commands.

The sims were not as bad/hard as i thought they may be, pretty basic in comparison to some of my labbing but the in depth labbing gave me greater understanding when answering questions. As normal, i find cisco exams hard to understand what the hell they are asking for. On the route exam you have a fair amount of time to take a cautious approach to each question. Read the question. Re read the question but focus on the parts its asking. If your still abit miffed, take notes to filter the cr*p outta there. Then approach the answers, read each carefully, dont just pick the first that appears to be correct. Then do the elimination process to filter out wrong answers.

From a personal perspective i rarely feel "ready" for an exam. I get to the point where i just end up taking it, Maybe it will be the same for you.

Those are just some tips from my experience.

Edit: Heres a link to my reactions/materials used for my route exam recently.
http://www.techexams.net/forums/ccnp/72001-so-today-i-decided-man-up-take-my-route-exam.html#post582624