CCNP ROUTE Passed!

I've been studying for ROUTE for a few months and felt I was close to passing going into this week, but I knew I had some weak areas. However, between school starting and going on-call next week, I didn't want my first attempt at ROUTE hanging over my head. On Monday, I made the decision to attempt ROUTE at the end of the week. I hit Boson's ExSim, Cisco Learning Labs, INE, and a few white papers and blogs with the knowledge I was testing today since I already paid for the exam. I did good on all of the categories except VPN and Infrastructure Services. Final score? 790

My test only had 48 questions, but it felt like every few questions was a sim. The most stressful part was that my last sim came in with 15 minutes to go and I still had 6 or 7 questions to go after it. I thought I was going to run out of time! My stress level went up, and I had to finish the sim without testing anything because I only had 5 minutes to go. Thankfully, the last few questions were simple. I completed the exam with less than a minutes to go, and thought I had failed due to rushing the last sim. Boy was I surprised to see the "Congratulations..." on the next screen.

I learned the topics on the Blueprint thanks to an INE AAP. I've probably watched around 150 hours of videos studying for this exam while using GNS3 to follow along. However, I was prepared for the format of this exam thanks to Boson's ExSim and the ROUTE labs in Cisco Learning Labs. I would have panicked and ran out of time if not for Boson's PreTest, and the structured labs in CLLs embedded a lot of the commands I used today into my head. Utilizing those two together as a final review was the piece I needed to pass on my first attempt.

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Comments

negru_tudor

Congratulations on the pass! Quite the adrenaline rush !

akegia

Congratulations!

Cisco Inferno

Congratulations. I have used both ROUTE and SWITCH official Cisco labs for school last semester. They are a very very valuable resource at only $100.
There is so much written information in those labs. Its a solid workbook with very detailed explanations. I enjoy that there are discovery and challenge labs.

Look up Travis Bonfigli on youtube, he's an INE instructor/community college prof. He posts plenty of walkthroughs for those harder labs.

What were your boson scores like? they are super hard.

joshuamurphy75

congrats

HappyBearIT

Travis' videos on INE were my first run through for all of the routing topics because I wanted a break from Keith after following his SWITCH videos. I started with the CCNA ones as a review and went through the CCNP ones. He's a very organized instructor which made it easy to follow.

On a side note, I think his videos were a subconcious reason I went with a Mac for my new laptop last November.

Cisco Inferno

HappyBearIT wrote: »

Travis' videos on INE were my first run through for all of the routing topics because I wanted a break from Keith after following his SWITCH videos. I started with the CCNA ones as a review and went through the CCNP ones. He's a very organized instructor which made it easy to follow.

On a side note, I think his videos were a subconcious reason I went with a Mac for my new laptop last November.

ah yes I meant to say Travis, not Thomas lol.

Yeah he speaks very nicely. His teaching background really shows.

If you have the all access pass, I used his "CCNA Candidate's guide to STP, EIGRP, and OSPF". They go WAY beyond the scope of CCNA.
Theres like 23 videos at almost 8 hours just for the STP series. I know I'll be using them for CCNP too.

On a side note, he is also a professor for CCNA Security at my school UMUC. He already started posting TONS of videos for it on his youtube page.

I'll be taking his class this fall.

I am assuming you are using the same tools for TSHOOT? Those learning labs look great! i havent tried them.

HappyBearIT

Cisco Inferno wrote: »

I am assuming you are using the same tools for TSHOOT? Those learning labs look great! i havent tried them.

For TSHOOT, my plan is to run through the CLLs, and hit any topics from SWITCH that I'm weak on. Then, I'll move on to the Boson PreTest. Finally, I'll go sit the real thing. From what I hear of the TSHOOT exam, its really easy if you're use to troubleshooting in real life, and you actually studied for ROUTE and SWITCH without dumping them. With that in mind, my plan is to knock out the CLLs and Boson pretest as quickly as possible so that I can go take the test. I'll probably even set up my homelab with the TSHOOT topology as a 3rd option just to get familiar with the setup from a 3rd perspective.

HappyBearIT

Cisco Inferno wrote: »

What were your boson scores like? they are super hard.

I use the Boson PreTest as the final review to see where I'm weak at. My "A" Pretest was just below 700 because I ran out of time. I rearranged the answers by incorrect and correct then read the incorrect answers as well as opened the links that were in the references. Those references to docs on Cisco.com helped me with a lot of the trivia topics in my weak categories. My "B" and "C" tests over the next two weeks were all right at 800 or just below it.