Exam-Taking Techniques

A well-known principle when taking certification exams is to first read over the entire exam from start to finish while answering only those questions you feel absolutely sure of. The next time around, you can delve into the more complex questions. Knowing how many such questions you have left helps you spend your exam time wisely. Although this is good overall testing advice, this capability is not available to you on the BSCI exam 642-801. To protect the integrity of the certifications, Cisco does not allow you to mark and go back to review a previously answered question.

It is critical on a Cisco exam that you read each question thoroughly. After you input your answer and move on to the next question, you cannot go back!

As you approach the end of your allotted testing time of 75 minutes, you are better off guessing than leaving a question unanswered.

The most important advice about taking any exam is this: Read each question carefully . Some questions are deliberately ambiguous, some use double negatives , and others use terminology in incredibly precise ways. The authors have taken numerous exams ”both practice and live ”and in nearly every one have missed at least one question because they didn't read it closely or carefully enough.

Here are some suggestions on how to deal with the tendency to jump to an answer too quickly:

Make sure you read every word in the question very carefully, even if it means reading it several times.
As you read, try to reformulate the question in your own words. If you can do this, you should be able to pick the correct answer(s) much more easily.
Sometimes, rereading a question enables you to see something you might have missed the first time you read it.
If you still do not understand the question, ask yourself what you don't understand about the question, why the answers don't appear to make sense, or what appears to be missing. If you think about the subject for a while, your subconscious might provide the details that are lacking or you might notice a "trick" that will point to the correct answer.

Above all, try to deal with each question by thinking through what you know about routing ”and the characteristics, behaviors, and facts involved. By reviewing what you know (and what you have written down on your information sheet), you will often recall or understand enough to be able to deduce the answer to the question.

Question-Handling Strategies

Based on exams the authors have taken, some interesting trends have become apparent. For those questions that take only a single answer, usually two or three of the answers will be obviously incorrect, and two of the answers will be possible ”of course, only one can be correct. Unless the answer leaps out at you, begin the process of answering by eliminating those answers that are most obviously wrong. A word of caution: If the answer seems too obvious, reread the question to look for a trick. Often those are the ones you are most likely to get wrong. If you have done your homework for an exam, no valid information should be completely new to you. In that case, unfamiliar or bizarre terminology most likely indicates a bogus answer.

As you work your way through the exam, budget your time by making sure you have completed one quarter of the questions one quarter of the way through the exam period and three quarters of them three quarters of the way through the exam. This ensures that you will have time to go through them all. As you know, there will be 55 “65 questions to answer in a 75-minute time frame. That gives you an average of a minute to a minute-and-a-half for each question. The simulation questions will probably take longer than the multiple-choice questions, so give yourself ample time.

Be cautious about changing your answers and second-guessing yourself. Many times the first selection is right and changing your answer might cause you to miss questions that were originally answered correctly.

If you are not finished when 95% of the time has elapsed, use the last few minutes to guess your way through the remaining questions. Remember that guessing is potentially more valuable than not answering because blank answers are always wrong, but a guess might turn out to be right. If you don't have a clue about any of the remaining questions, pick answers at random or choose all As, Bs, and so on. The important thing is to submit an exam for scoring that has an answer for every question.

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Shannon M., Tittel E.

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