Scheduled for Sept. 12th

/usr

Will update here after I sit in a couple weeks.

I'm somewhat nervous already. I frequent the CWNP forums as well, and people there say this version is quite difficult. I suppose we'll see. I'm having trouble finding any relevant material, other than the official guide. I tried the IEEE whitepapers, but it's basically the same information that's in the book, only harder to grasp.

jd_mattos

Good Luck Man!
Let us know how it goes.

/usr

Nice avatar.

JDMurray

Webmaster just got me a copy of the new CWNA Study Guide. I must say that it's a big improvement over the previous edition, both in size and quality. The page layout, clarity of the writing, and usefulness of the information is worthy of an O'Reilly book. To me, the "information density" of the book makes the CWNA look like an intense exam.

I could only suggest looking for whitepapers that cover subjects in the study guide. I don't think it'll be necessary to know too much detail about 802.11 security, packet content, and protocol behavior. The exams can cover a lot of topics, but only an inch deep into each one. The scenario questions will be the ones to ponder the longest.

And good luck!

Webmaster

jdmurray wrote:

Webmaster just got me a copy of the new CWNA Study Guide. I must say that it's a big improvement over the previous edition, both in size and quality. The page layout, clarity of the writing, and usefulness of the information is worthy of an O'Reilly book. To me, the "information density" of the book makes the CWNA look like an intense exam.

Sounds like I need to get one for myself too. I already thought the first ed was a better book than many popular cert study guide series out there. It reminded me of the good old 'red books' from Novell. If you read and learned from those, you won't be suprised about 99% of the exam topics.

Good luck /usr!

JDMurray

Webmaster wrote:

Sounds like I need to get one for myself too. I already thought the first ed was a better book than many popular cert study guide series out there. It reminded me of the good old 'red books' from Novell. If you read and learned from those, you won't be surprised about 99% of the exam topics.

The 3rd edition is so much better than the first. You must pick one up for yourself. So far my only complaint is that I wish they had used a typeface other than New Times Roman. I really like the Garamond typeface that O'Reilly uses. The typeface is a really important part of the readability of the text.

Probably the only thing that the new study guide won't prepare you for on the exam are the scenario-format questions. Maybe more of the on-line exam questions are scenario questions now. As I remember, the original CWNA on-line exam didn't have that many, and that made the on-line practice exams look a lot different than the actual exam.

/usr

The new questions are much more scenario oriented, however, there are only 120 of them, as opposed to the 450 or so before.

Ten9t6

Sounds like I need to get a copy of this also...I need to refresh before moving on to the Security....Yeah, I know..I have been talking about it for a while. Sooner or later I will actually do it.

Is there a new Security one?

Kenny

/usr

I think they're updating the CWSP in the near future, buy jdmurray can confirm that.

I DO know that their CWSP book is quite cheap...maybe that's the reason why.

Webmaster

The cheap CWSP book was the 1.0 version. Version 2.0 was released last month. The new CWSP exam should be released during the last quarter of this year:

www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=8668

MissionKap1001

Where are the answers to the questions at the end of the chapters? Does anyone have a link to as where I can find the answers?

JDMurray

Webmaster wrote:

The cheap CWSP book was the 1.0 version. Version 2.0 was released last month.

Apparently the 2nd ediiton of the CWSP Study Guide has not yet been released. The CWSP Study Guide on sale at CWNP is still the first edition (April 2003). I am *very* interested to see the 2nd edition and all the new 802.11i stuff.

http://www.cwne.com/products/CWSPSG.html

/usr

I plan on making tonight and tomorrow pretty much all day cram sessions, then relaxing Sunday.

I'm kind of nervous, but I can always take it again if I fail.

JDMurray

/usr wrote:

I'm kind of nervous, but I can always take it again if I fail.

But think of the money that you will save if you pass it the first time. That always motivates me.

Good luck!

/usr

Indeed, it IS quite a bit. I feel "as confident as I can be". Due to the fact that there are only 120 practice questions available, that I've skimmed the whitepapers, and that I've read the book through 3-4 times and made notes on ALL exam objectives.

/usr

Do you happen to know if each question on the exam is weighted the same? There are 60 questions, with a 70% needed to pass. Just trying to figure out about how many can be missed.

JDMurray

It's not an adaptive exam, so I assume that all questions carry equal weight. And probably several experimental questions may be asked for possible use on future exams, and therefore they won't be counted in the final score regardless of your answer.

I bet those question have been asked and answered a few times on the CWNA.com forums.

/usr

Yeah, I browsed around a bit but couldn't find much, so I just figured I would ask here.

Webmaster

/usr wrote:

Yeah, I browsed around a bit but couldn't find much, so I just figured I would ask here.

You came to the right place then:
www.techexams.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2832
The info is a bit older, but I assume they didn't change the scoring system since.

/usr

Eh, I'm seeing people on the cwnp forum fail with a 40-50%.

Hopefully it's just their study technique, because I feel fairly confident that I can score at least a 70% on this exam. I suppose we'll see tomorrow.

JDMurray

/usr wrote:

Eh, I'm seeing people on the cwnp forum fail with a 40-50%.

Hopefully it's just their study technique,

I'm really interested know how the questions are worded, and what's the percentage of simple questions, complex questions, and scenario questions. I'm thinking that the on-line practice questions are not representative of all the question formats on the exams. If people are expecting the CWxx test questions to be like those on the CompTIA exams then I can see why there's such a high failure rate.

/usr

I failed with a 66%, or by two questions. I have a few complaints with the exam, which I'm going to post on the CWNA board.

JDMurray

Sorry to hear that, /usr. Post a link to the thread here so we can all follow along.

What were your basic impressions of the exam?

/usr

It's a nice exam and most certainly expects you to know what you're talking about. Here's the link. Feel free to comment on what I've written there. I'll be happy to discuss it.

http://cwnp.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=912

/usr

Heh, I had the exam blow up on me at least 8 times as well. I would get an "illegal operation", then it would boot me out, so I would have to get up and go get the lady to reset everything for me. Luckily I didn't lose anything, but it was frustrating.

JDMurray

I agree with you about not being able to go back and review and change answers. The CWNE has the only cert exams I've seen where you can't do this. I took the entire CWNA without realizing you can't go back and change answers, and it was a surprise for me at the end. Maybe this is part of the "difficulty" of the exams.

And I had an A+ exam blow up on me once. Although I didn't loose any work, just that one time was a distraction to me. I can't imagine going through it eight-plus times.

/usr

I'm kind of hoping they may refund the money, if the problem was on their end. Although I do feel like there is a small gap in my knowledge of the material, I DID only miss it by two questions and may have done a bit better, had I not had to constantly get up and wait arond for the testing engine to come back up.