| mclane 2002-07-19, 10:34 am |
| Hi,
I took the 441 exam today. Don't want to go into details about my preparation timeline because it was a bit chaotic. I had three books:
1 Cisco Press CCDA Cert Guide
2 Sybex CCDA Study Guide
3 Sybex CCDA Exam Notes
I didn't use #3 until the exam day, and it wasn't very helpful. #2 was ok but doesn't leave the surface very often, is outdated and has some serious errors - only few of them are listed on the Sybex site. But it gave a good overview of the stuff before I read #1 which is pretty detailed and probably without major errors.
If you don't have basic networking knowledge you should (according to #1) also read the "Internetworking Technologies Handbook" from Cisco Press. Would be good anyway because there were subjects in the exam I didn't find in any of the 3 books but I don't have this book.
The Exam: I had 150 min for 72 Questions, about 25 of them concerning 4 case studies. As someone already said here: The case studies in the exam are kind of senseless. Congratulations to everyone who has a photographic memory and recalls 4 cases anytime in every detail after reading them (in a terrible format). But what for?
So this is what I did: I read them the first time they appeared. When there was a question about them I scanned the exhibit over. If I didn't find the answer this way in 30s I eliminated the obviously silly answers (which unfortunatley were not so obvious in this kind of questions) and took the best looking answer from the rest - I had no other way because the letters began to dance before my eyes more than once ;-).
So I was happy about every question that queried real knowledge and answered them quickly.
The idea of case studies is ok but they should be fewer and more limited to facts - and better formatted. I had 30 min left in the end and scored 893 which doesn't make me happy but satisfied. You can say "You should have spent the time on better answers" but I think it didn't make sense and could lead to wrong answers sometimes.
For my future certs I will rely on Cisco Press Books (though I already bought the Sybex CCNP Study Guide Kit because the Lammle CCNA book was ok). They seem to be less faulty and much more detailed.
cu - mclane |