【转】A Sneak Peek at the CCIE R/S Lab

The recently announced changes to the CCIE R/S written and lab exams
took effect this week. I recently had the chance to take the R/S lab
again, as part of the Beta testing - so I decided to save up some
observations and post them around the time the new exam has come out.
Today I'll look at a variety of things about the lab exam, and make
another post next week concentrating on the biggest change: The 2-hour
troubleshooting section.
You know, the strange thing is that many times over the years, I've
wondered if they'd let me take the CCIE R/S Lab again - and not take
away my CCIE number if I failed. It has certainly changed a lot since I
took it back in 1995. I've always had the itch to try for another CCIE,
but I think I've had a cumulative 3-4 weeks in the last 5 years without
a book to work on (that's definitely not a complaint), and it obviously
takes more than casual effort to prep for another CCIE lab. And getting
a CCIE in your spare time pretty much changes your life until you get
it done, and I've never wanted another CCIE bad enough to make that
sacrifice. But, I just always thought it'd be interesting to sit the
lab again. And then Maurilio asked a few of us Cisco Press CCIE
authors, plus others I'm sure, to sit the lab and give it a test. And
it was fun.
OK, on to stuff you folks might care more about. I came to the exam
with several specific items to keep an eye out for - things like the
impact of adding a 2-hour troubleshooting section, how the config
section would be different now that it's 5.5 hours instead of 7.5, and
the supposedly-dreaded open-ended questions. But the biggest surprise
was obvious from the first few minutes of lab time - they changed the
user interface of what you see to access the lab, and as a result,
there's no printed lab exercise book. The only paper for the lab is the
note paper they give you to write on.
In the old days, you got a lab booklet that you couldn't write on,
but you could do the natural thing and pick up the book to look at the
various lab requirements. I believe it's true that the book had some
lab diagrams as well. Now you get a GUI interface from which you can
pull up the many different lab diagrams, read the various lab
exercises. My gut reaction was that I didn't like not having a book.
After experiencing it, I thought the replacement GUI would have been
reasonable if I had had time to practice with it.
The good part of the GUI was that once I was used to it, I could
navigate to the next topic for both troubleshooting and config easily.
The GUI essentially indexed the main lab exercise tasks, which may be a
bit more convenient than flipping pages in a booklet. Once I got used
to it (20 minutes maybe), I stopped to ask myself if the user interface
itself would slow me down compared to the paper booklet, and I decided
that if the small bugs were removed (e.g., no back button on the
browser to get to the docs), AND if I had a chance to practice before
the lab (so that 20 minute learning curve wasn't part of the timed
test), that it wouldn't have hurt. Otherwise, call it a 20 minute hit
for the day, wild unscientific guess. (I did ask, and as of now, there
is no tutorial available before the exam; if it's your first lab with
this interface, you'll get to learn it concurrent with doing the
troubleshooting. I'd suggest asking as many questions as you can about
the user interface before starting the timer.)
There were negatives to the GUI, but of course GUIs often have to do
with personal preference. In this case, a few of my author friends and
I were allowed to discuss amongst ourselves our impressions, and we all
agreed that the navigation in the GUI was a bit of a problem. EG, to
view a figure, you click, and a window pops, which is fine. However,
you can't minimize the window so that the bigger window behind it,
where you access the console windows, is hidden. You can re-size, and
move, but not minimize. To see another figure, the figure shows up in
the same window, so to view both - like a cabling reference and a
different VLAN reference - you have to toggle back and forth, and never
see both at once. Then, to see the console term emulator windows, you
have to move the figure window to the side, and then drag it back to
see it again. No minimize/pop-open toggle like with Windows. Each
figure required a different window size/shape to see the whole figure,
and all the figures showed up in this one window, so there was no
ability to make it the right size and find a good place on the screen
for it.
Sorry for the ramble, but I wanted enough detail out to make a
point: If I were taking it again to pass, I'd consider drawing a few of
the figures for the config section, particularly the LAN layer 2 figure
- both cabling and VLANs - on paper before even beginning to configure.
(I would do this for the config section, but not for the t'shooting
section.)
Next, let me give you some idea on the whole "is it too much" issue.Most CCIE lab candidates that pass seem to do so with at least a
little time to spare, and those that fail often run out of time, or
don't have time to review. So, I came to the test asking myself "if I
were truly prepared for the lab, could I have finished on time enough
to review my work?" This question has a new twist, now that it's
3-part: open ended questions, then 2 hours of t'shooting, and then 5.5
hours config. (FYI, I didn't study except on the flight to Raleigh, and
I don't stay current on everything so I could go fast enough to pass -
so I estimated what "well prepared" meant.) The short answer is that I
think that the troubleshooting section was attainable for a
well-prepared candidate, and maybe a little too much (maybe shave 10%
of the tasks to be fair), but the config section was too much by at
least 20%. (My buddies co-authors thought roughly the same on config,
and maybe that the t'shooting needed to be shaved more than my 10%
guesstimate.)
Sitting back contemplating the whole "is it too much" thing, I came to two conclusions:
1) It was a Beta, and Cisco needs some experience with specific lab
exams to figure out how much is too much. I'm sure they didn't write
all new lab exams, so the trick is to figure out how to compress the
former 7.5 hour lab into 5.5 hours. They want you to pass if you know
your stuff, and fail if you don't. They don't want you to fail if you
truly know your stuff but they just gave you too much. From a
systematic perspective, I think they'll get the right mix. (Granted,
I'm sure some of you have contradictory experiences on this point!)
2) I wonder if Cisco considered that the shrinkage from 7.5 to 5.5
hours on the build section was like removing the final 2 hours - the
hours in which you are most familiar with the lab - rather than
removing the first two hours. By the end 3rd hour of the
build section, I needed the figures less and less. From a sheer
mechanics perspective, I worked faster. Call it 3 hours in the config
section before I was somewhat comfortable with the topology. With a 5.5
hour build, that splits the unfamiliar/familiar time as 3/2.5 hours.
The old 7.5 hours would have given a 3 /4.5 hour split, so it felt like
I was losing 2 hours of very productive time.

The next thing I was particularly curious about was the open-ended
question section. Frankly, I'm a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde on this one.
Wendell the cert guy looked at my open ended questions, and asked
himself: "If I was truly prepared for the lab, would these questions be
a problem?" Absolutely not. As a guy who has an interest in seeing
Cisco certs thrive, I see the open-ended questions for what Cisco
claims them to be - a cheating prevention tool. However, Wendell the
imaginary CCIE R/S lab candidate says that the whole idea scares me to
death, and may be too unfair to use as a cheating prevention tool. If I
had been taking the lab on my nickel for real, rather than just kicking
the tires, I would've been pysched out by the open-ended questions. You
could get an unlucky draw of questions and get sent home. For real CCIE
R/S candidates, I think this means that you don't get ready for 70% of
the topics, and go take the lab to experience it - you may not get past
the questions. However, from what I saw, and from other discussions, I
think if you're ready for all aspects of the lab, you'll be ready for
the open-ended stuff. It's just a little scary.
Last thing for today: general difficulty. I tried to imagine myself
as a well-prepared candidate, but not over the top - you know, if I
took the classes, did labs from a few lab books, read Doyle/Halabi/etc,
practiced a lot for speed, then the lab I got was not too difficult. In
fact, I did not see a single item that I viewed as a "trick" - no
wording that made me do function X using methods no one in their right
mind would try. Everything I saw was detailed - it required mastery of
a lot of topics - but it was all stuff that you might come across as
something you'd really use in the real world. Really. That was a nice
surprise. The difficulty level comes from seeing the requirements,
mentally putting it all together, deciding what to configure,
configuring, t'shooting to make sure it works, and doing that 5X faster
than you would have to do in real life. But it was refreshing to not
see anything that looked like tricks just to make sure you knew how to
make one parm on one command do its thing.
One more note on the difficulty level: I think if you prepared with
the traditional tools - books, classes, lab books, lots of hands-on
practice, and understood it, that the difficulty level was very fair
and reasonable.
OK, that' it for today. Next time, I'll look at the Troubleshooting section in particular.