i'm taking the foundations test on april 2. i'm fairly new to this whole certification world. this will be my first, if ever. anyway, i bought the ciw foundations suite. it's supposed to arrive late this week. you think that's enough time to study?

i read most of the posts here and they're helping me a lot. thanks everyone.

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I see in your 'working on' : inet.
why are u taking CIW Foundations and at the same time taking iNET?
you can kill two birds with one stone.
I'm not saying you can't take them...

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it could be a bit tough. Although the fastest way to study definitely is with the official materials - the others available on the market right now tend to emphasise the wrong things and spend way too much time on unnecessary details...

Basically, if you've played around on the internet at all, the basic internet questions should not be much of a problem - as long as you've refreshed your memory by looking over the materials.

The advanced internet information will probably not be too difficult to learn quickly, either - you'll have to memorise a bit, but you should be familiar with the general terrain...

What may pose the most problems if you're new to IT work will be the networking information (types of cables, types of topologies and architectures, etc.), and more "theoretical" constructs like the OSI model. If you have no background in this area, it may be pushing it a bit to take the test in early April.

You should be aware that the materials are rather long - and that you may need to follow up on some of them with outside sources. The real issue may come down to whether you have time to read and take notes on everything in a couple of weeks.

At the very least, you should start with the chapters covering material you're least familiar with - that will give this material the longest period of time to "sink in" before the test. If you basically know a subject already, it can be okay to read chapters on that subject a day or two before the test.

To give yourself some sense of how much study you will need, you should try some of the free practice tests floating around the net - there are lots of them on the Foundations exam. You should also take a look at some of the study sites - cramsession.com and myciw.com are two that I've found particularly useful. If you read the cramsession material on Foundations, for example, and find that most of it is new to you, you may want to postpone your exam.

I second the comment that iNet and Foundations are interchangable - pick one and take it. There's no need to take both...

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Good advice, Vidon. I concur.

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thank you for the advice. my company's sponsoring the certification. i was supposed to take i-net+ but then they changed their minds and decided to go with CIW. i won't be taking both, don't worry ) i've read most of the exam notes posted on the web already. as for the practice exams, are they really similar to the real test? or are they way easier?

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While I am eternally grateful for the people who have spent time putting free practice tests on the net, these tests are sometimes not written the best, sometimes they contain incorrect answers, and sometimes they contain... er... misguided questions...

While the commercial tests are generally better written, they tend to ask more straight-forward questions: "What is x?", rather than "In x situation, what is the best thing to do?"

The actual test has far more questions of the type "In x situation, etc." - it will ask you to apply your knowledge, rather than define terms. (One exception are the questions on the OSI model, presumably because the model is definitional by nature...)

I haven't found any practice test whose questions were predominantly in the form of the real test...

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