Step 7 : Strategy

You are at the ccie lab exam and it is time to start. What will you do ? Just start with configuring the routers ? Or do you start to read the whole exam before touching a keyboard ? Do you start at the beginning and skip questions when you don’t know the answers ? You will have to think about this before starting the lab exam.

Fact is that you will get 100 points on most CCIE lab exams and you will have 80 points or more to pass. You can get points for paragraphs which contains different questions. In order to get those points, you will have all answers correct to get the points for that section or paragraph. You won’t get 2 out of 3 points when you got 2/3 correct. You will have 100% correct of that part to get the full 3 points !

With a good ccie strategy, you can “calculate” how much time you can have for each question. You will get 480 minutes to finish the lab. You need about 60 minutes to read the exam and redraw the topology. You can use 380 minutes for the 100 points, without verification. Verification is also important and I calculate 80 minutes for verification. This will leave me with 300 minutes for 100 points. This means that you have about 3 minutes for 1 point. If you got a 3 point question, you will have to finish this question in 9 minutes.

When you failed for your first lab you will know what I mean. When I did my first CCIE Voice lab attempt and I had a look at the questions I had the feeling that the questions were not that hard. I started with the lab and when it was time to stop I only finished 2/5 of the exam ! I needed way more time. To practice on time I knew that I had to practice on the basics so that I could type everything without any thinking.