Boson exam questions included with SWITCH OCG

bermovick

These exam questions are BRUTAL - enough that they've made me postpone scheduling my exam, just because of how ... I dunno; horrible they are. Incredibly specific (moreso that I've seen with any of the actual exams I've sat). But I've also heard bad things about the Switch exam's questions so I don't know if they're indicative of what I'd actually see.

Does anyone have any comparison between the two regarding the quality of the questions? I know a number of the questions seemed to be a "pick 2 of the configuration commands required for this", with answers that were only 1 required and several optional. Or extremely specific things: "what is the dscp code point for flash?".

I'm just curious if I need to put it off or if I'm ok. I get the concepts and I do ok, but with questions like these it's almost like I have to go through and memorize all the tables (and I don't mind admitting I suck at rote memorization). $200 and a 2-hour drive (each way) makes me hesitant to just bite the bullet.

johnwest43

I cant speak for the switch exam or the boson switch pratice tests, but it has been my expierence that if you can score 70-75 % on the boson exams ( without displaying the correct answers) then you should be able to pass the real exam. The boson exams have always been harder than the real test in my expierence.

wave

After trying both Cisco Press Boson exams that came with the ICND1 and ICND2 OCG's I would never waste my time using those exams ever again!! They are full or errors and are not a fair equivalent to the real exam questions.

I HIGHLY recommend purchasing the official Boson practice tests. You'll get a discount because you have the Cisco Press books (see last pages). I used the official Boson exams for ICND1 and ICND2 and found them to be extremely helpful.

bermovick

Oh absolutely, but I always felt the questions really tested your knowledge on the subject, rather than .... well, I'm not even sure.

I took screenshots of 4 particularly horrible examples to share when I took another practice today. Did all 84 questions rather than the usual 50. Scored a 904 - of course I don't know how many of those are from remembering the answers, but I've scheduled anyway.

Stupid Questions

vinbuck

johnwest43 wrote: »

I cant speak for the switch exam or the boson switch pratice tests, but it has been my expierence that if you can score 70-75 % on the boson exams ( without displaying the correct answers) then you should be able to pass the real exam. The boson exams have always been harder than the real test in my expierence.

That's definitely true for the CCNA level material, but I found it to be less so for CCNP level exams. The ROUTE exam was harder than the Boson EX-SIM max questions i used to prepare and the EX-SIM max questions were much harder than the Boson questions included with the OCG.

The memory tables in the ROUTE OCG were probably one of the most helpful study aids fro ROUTE and I wish the SWITCH OCG had something similar because you have to know your command syntax and permutations from memory to pass these exams.