Failed GCIA - 503: Help and Extra Practice Exams

callicles · September 2014

Coming out of 'lurking-mood' and requesting any help and if anyone has extra practice exams.

My biggest take away from failing the exam was time. I performed okay-to-good on the practice exams, 70% and 80%. However, when I got to the real deal - I realized I was not prepared on time-scheduling. The real exam was definitely harder than the practice exams. By the half-way mark around question 70, I was at 71% and had 40minutes to answer 80 questions. In the end, I ended up missing the minimum 67% by 13 questions.

Secondly, would anyone have advice on how to study for the following Topics:
Advanced IDS Concepts
Fragmentation
IPv6
Network Traffic Analysis and Forensic
Packet Engineering

Lastly, any extra practice exams would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you all very much.

*Studying Procedure:
Highlighted the SANS books
Table of Content style Index (Main concepts, Tools, Types of Attacks)
Used sticky tabs to highlight the main pages/concepts and theories
Study time - (solid) 3 weeks

dover · September 2014

callicles,

Sorry about the fail. That's a tough one. Before I go spouting off recommendations for study materials can I ask if you challenged the exam or did you take the SANS training course?

I took the SANS OnDemand 503 course and it was by far the best class I've ever had.

Let me know if you challenged and I can put together some study materials for you.

Dover

Khaos1911 · September 2014

Sorry to hear that. I hope this isn't a bad omen for me, I've been stressing over the last couple months with the official study material and I just booked my exam for today.

laughing_man · September 2014

I routinely hear the GCIA is one of the tougher 500 level SANS courses. I know that is not much consolation, but do not get disheartened.

I will echo what dover said: did you challenge the exam or do you have the SANS course books? If you have the course books, they will have all the study material you need. Plus you should have the print out displaying your results for each topic on the test. I would use that as my guide and re-study any area 3 stars and under.

azmatt · October 2014

503 and 508 are both tough so there's zero shame in struggling with either.

It sounds like you had a good index for your course books so if time was an issue was it the hex level packet analysis taking up a lot of time? For that exam you need to be very comfortable with packet headers and walking through the packet's hex field by field, recognizing one packet inside of another etc. Once I got comfortable that it helped out quite a bit.

On the other topics, the books will have all of the info you need. When I do my index making read through I go page by page and ask if I could explain the content to some someone tech savvy. My rule of thumb is I don't need to be an expert but I need to understand it good enough to explain it and answer basic questions. I would focus on a re-read with slight googling of questionable topics as opposed to grabbing other books.

Head up and good luck!

Matt

callicles · October 2014

Thank you all for the support. A week away from it all certainly got me out of the depression and back into the game.

Dover: I did not challenge the course. My work sent me to the Sans course. As much as I enjoyed Mike Poor, I found the class did not benefit my learning abilities. It wasn't a large class 45-50 students, and I was able to grasp the labs we'll enough to finish them. Most of my knowledge and experience comes from on-the-job. Perhaps I just missed the "3-foot stomp" signals of things that we're absolutely going to be on the exam.

I did find during the paratice exams all of the information is indeed in the Sans provided books (paragraphs and slides). Besides the Sans course books I also had "Network Intrusion Detection" by Northcutt & Novak with me which I referenced throughout the exam.

Laughing_Man: I do have that print out and firgured it would be a good starting point. However, my concern is I did better on sections I felt weak on and failed the sections I thought I had a good grasp on. For example, what azmatt brought up, packet reading. I had both confidence and packet header **** sheets, and didn't score as well as I expected. But, what I struggled on during the test and seemed to have a lot more questions on was tcpdump and wireshark filters - I had 4 stars.

Thank you all again. And Khoas1911, hope you passed - no bad omens. Please privde any pointers from your experience, if you have any.

Khaos1911 · October 2014

Will do, Callicles. My GCIA is scheduled for the end of the month, Oct 27.

Failed GCIA - 503: Help and Extra Practice Exams

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