Thoughts and Assessment of the CCIE Routing and Switching Written Exam

I would have just taken and cleared the CCIE Routing and Switching 5.1 Written Exam earlier. There have been many mixed reviews about the CCIE Routing and Switching Written Exam in the past and I wanted to give my honest review of the exam as well as clear many of the concerns people who would be having regarding the exam’s content. Hence, if you wish to have a good and reliable training provider, you should check out the courses offered at the SPOTO Club.

First of all, you are required to realize this is an expert level exam. As such, you would be expected to have a depth of knowledge about the topics on the exam. Second, the broad scope of the exam does adding to the perceived difficulty of the exam because there would be many more technologies that could be tested. This would be leading to my third point. Despite the above, the only two things that would be needed to do well on this exam are considered to be deep familiarity with the subject matter as well as the ability to reason between the given choices for an exam question.

Throughout my exam, my experience was that none of the questions were quite tricky or it would seem to be intended to “purposely fail you to make money” or “trip you up”. All questions would be mapped to the blueprint so expect to see a decent distribution of questions from all the topics. They were honest questions that would be presented in a scenario and have asked questions about the scenario. As long as you would be keeping a level head and would be able to think clearly through the scenarios presented, you are required to be able to determine the right choice.

This doesn’t mean that the exam would be considered an easy exam. You have to be familiar as well as understand the reasons which would be considered behind each topic on the blueprint at an expert level. It isn’t considered to be enough in some cases to just understand Cisco's marketing information about a topic like the DMVPN. You are required to gain an understanding of architecture.

I would have found that being familiar with the command line configurations for each technology which would be helping you immensely with gaining this deep knowledge. For Instance, if you have known the MPLS L2 VPNs allow L2 connectivity between CE routers, if a question on the exam would be asked to you about running a PE-CE routing protocol, you could be the reason of the plausibility of such a configuration.

Start off with the “why” of the technology. Why it would be exciting? What does it is going to do? Where would you have to use it? Learn as well as understand that with curiosity. Then proceed on to how it would be solved. For instance, what purpose does NHRP which would be served in DMVPN? When you would have knowledge that purpose, the next question is would be how do the configuration commands fit in to serve that purpose. Combine this type of thinking with experience on the command line as well as you would be heading in the right direction for the exam.

In closing, as long as you would be getting a good, deep understanding of the exam topics either through reading or intense lab work so as to the point where you would be able to able to use good deductive reasoning, this exam should not present a problem at all. Again, stressing the reasoning part of the process. This exam is considered to be a reasoning exam.

I have also opted for a good and reliable training provider, the SPOTO Club, to gain the CCIE Routing and Switching Certification in a single attempt.

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