Exam Techniques and Cisco Exams

It's safe to assume that this is not your first IT certification exam; if it is, I strongly recommend stepping back and taking an introductory-level exam first. Cisco exams are among the industry's more difficult. In part, that is because Cisco sets a relatively high standard, but it is also due to the depth and breadth of material you must know.

In some exams, including certification exams, you are penalized for guessing. This exam and every other Cisco exam do not fall into that group : Unanswered questions are counted wrong. If a question has four answers, of which one is correct, even if you know nothing about this topic, you have a 25% chance of getting it right if you pick an answer any answer. You have a 100% chance of getting it wrong if you leave it blank. Answer every question, even if you must take a guess!

As mentioned earlier in this chapter, you cannot change your mind about any answer after you have gone on to the next question. That might require you to handle this exam differently from the way you would prefer: You would want to put in a snap answer, or a first- impression answer, on a difficult question and then keep it in the back of your mind as you go through the rest of the exam. At the end, with the time you have left, you then would go back and look again at those bothersome ones and (if you have changed your mind) modify your answer.

That won't work with this exam (of course, you will have answered the question rather than have left it blank). When you go on to the next question, your answer to the current question is recorded and cannot be changed . That means you must manage your time carefully . Spend the time you need on a question to answer it, but do not dwell on that question too long, or you will not have enough time to think through the next tricky oneor the one after that.

For the most part, your first impression of the correct answer will be right, provided that you read carefully both the question and the available answers. Cisco often uses negative questions (such as "which of these is not "), or questions with extra verbiage. As an example of the latter, consider this:

When using VLSM, you must consider the number of subnets required and the number of hosts per subnet, which may vary from one subnet to the next. If you have the address space 192.168.1.0/24 and need to divide it into subnets, one of which can hold 68 hosts , which of these is a valid subnet?

Read that question again: Did you notice the first sentence is fluff? It is irrelevant to answering the question. If anything, it serves to cue you that this question is about subnetting, but that's also pretty clear from the second sentence . The question really is this: "Which of these subnets of 192.168.1.0/24 can hold 68 hosts?"

Don't hesitate to rephrase Cisco's questions, like I just did, to clarify what is really being asked. The question-writers are not perfect, and sometimes you might need to sort out what they are really asking for. It is easy to take that too far, of course, and most questions are actually quite straightforward. Keep on eye on the time (in the test engine, a clock is displayed in the upper-right corner of your screen) and read carefully both the questions and the answers. Sometimes two answers look identical, but there is some small difference between them. It might not be easy to find, and it could be in syntax ("crypto ipsec blah, blah" in one and "ipsec crypto blah, blah" in the otherdon't focus entirely on the "blah, blah" part), but it will be there. You generally will have the time to be patient with troublesome questions, provided that you are reasonably well prepared (so that there aren't many " troublesome " questions).

If you don't immediately see an answer that you know is correct, eliminate those that you know are incorrect. You could wind up having to think about the difference between two answers and which is better, but you've just improved your chances from 25% (or 20%, if five answers were available) to 50%. Sometimes knowing the OSI layers and what happens in each of them will help you eliminate that last answer. You might be down to choosing between a switch and a router when you remember that the function in question depends on IP. Aha! IP operates at Layer 3, where routers work, not switches. On to the next question!

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The CSI Exam will ask you to apply your networking knowledge to securing the network. Don't hesitate to think about what is happening in the network in the context of the question. In other words, don't park the rest of your networking knowledge outside with your notes; bring it in with you and use it.




CSI Exam Cram 2 (Exam 642-541)
CCSP CSI Exam Cram 2 (Exam Cram 642-541)
ISBN: 0789730243
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 177
Authors: Annlee Hines

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