CCDA/CCDP - I passed ARCH, 642-871, yesterday(M)

Author

I passed ARCH, 642-871, yesterday(M)

wanman_3

2004-04-17, 4:19 pm

Passed ARCH yesterday, so I guess I am now a CCDP. I haven't posted here before, but I have lurked for the past couple of weeks. I attended the GK class for ARCH a couple of months ago, so I had the class books to study. I also used Boson CCDP tests #1 and the new #2. Boson test #1 for the CCDP is just about useless. The grammar, punctuation and spelling is horrible and the explanations are just bad. Boson #2 for CCDP is pretty good. Explanations are good and the questions are relevant.
As for the actual ARCH test, without violating the NDA, I think I can say the following (remember, this was only 70 questions out of the pool and another set of questions may focus more on different/other subjects):

70 questions, 774 to pass.
Very little, if any, on AVVID and SAFE specifically. However, you should know this and how it relates to the design of a network and vice-versa.
ECNM was covered fairly extensively.
Had a fairly even assortment of questions on multicast (tricky), QoS, content networking and storage area networking. Know when to apply the different types of storage networking.
Wireless was covered, although not as extensively as the above subjects, and the questions were fairly straight-forward.
Read between the lines on scenario type questions. What I had required you to know the Cisco answer, while other answers might have been appropriate as well.
VoIP and Call Manager were not covered to the extent that I had expected. I was weak on this and spent more time studying it.
I felt there was plenty of time; I never felt rushed. I usually take tests quickly anyway.
I will be glad to answer any general questions (taking the NDA into account) about the exam or any subject related questions.
NOTE TO MOD: If you feel I have violated the NDA in anyway with this summary, please feel free to edit or delete with no hard feelings from me. I have found in preparing for this exam that there are very few resources available, so I am just trying to add my part to the value of this forum.

Thanks

devlan

2004-04-17, 9:24 pm

Way to go! I passed this one last week also. The objectives cover a lot of interesting material, but it's a toughie to prepare for, due to the lack of an exam guide and the wide variety of topics.

One thing that helped was the new flash card/quiz book for CCDA/CCDP. By the time you're acing all that (I went back over CCDA, especially for telephony), you're ready to make an educated guess on anything that isn't obvious. There were still plenty of surprises (again, the breadth of topics) but this book definitely helped me muddle through.

The SRND guides on Cisco's site also helped a lot. You can get a lot of good clues on storage, wireless, VPN, content, and telephony from that stuff, if you browse through them with a focus on the objectives.

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