ONT – Epic Fail
I failed the ONT test today. It was an utter lack of subject matter knowledge that did me in from the beginning. When the first three questions mention things that I’ve never even heard, it’s going to be a long test. I’ll take blame on it for sure, but the test was a lot darker than I imagined it would be.
I heard from a couple people that the ONT test was the easiest of the 4 CCNP test. I must say today’s test was a LOT harder than the ISCW test I took back in December. Most of the questions were fair, but there were a few that were down-right evil or unanswerable. Without giving too much away, there were some matching questions that had multiple items with multiple answers, rendering the answer to a guess. I even ran into a CLI question about the WLC, which surely wasn’t mentioned anywhere I studied, and I don’t have a spare sitting around on which to test. The icing, though, was the number of questions about FRTS; I know I need to understand it, but the magical question dice landed on that topic way too many times in my opinion.
At the heart of it, I think my demise stemmed from using only the Cisco Press book. I really needed to get a wider exposure to the topics. Though the CP books might have mentioned some topics that I missed, a lot of it is mentioned in passing but appeared in detail on the test. I would think getting different training would fix that problem and I’ll be using some of our CLCs this week to do just that
The facility was great, though. I was comfortable and couldn’t hear traffic or the lecture across the hall this time. At least I know a good place to take tests now. I hope somebody gets some value from my absolute failure.
Send any test vouchers questions my way.
Good luck with your next attempt. I would highly recommend the sample tests from Boson. I recently did my CCNA Wireless using the Cisco Press book and the Boson exams. Cisco Press is a good start, but they never seem to be up to the full challenge.
Ben
16 Feb 10 at 15:56
oh that’s bad. I am truly sorry for you Aaron! I am actually a bit surprised that they’re going to ask CLI commands for the WLC. ONT is quite far away for me as I am still studying for the BCMSN – although we should not forget that those examns are outdated in July…. I wish you all the best for your next attempt!!!
sebastian
17 Feb 10 at 03:10
Thanks, guys. I was just as shocked as anyone when I saw the CLI question. I thought that was pretty ridiculous since I don’t tend to have $4k devices in my lab. I think I just got a bad roll on the questions selected since I was scoring the 90% ranges on all the tests I was taking.
Thanks for the recommendation, Ben. I’ll give the Boson stuff a look.
Aaron Conaway
18 Feb 10 at 10:01
I too thought the ONT was a bit rough. The wireless questions are quite mean and out of place IMHO.
Anyway, good luck for next time round, you’ll get it.
Karl
20 Feb 10 at 01:00
Looks like Global Knowledge is selling off their ONT CDs if you’ve got $850 laying around
http://www.globalknowledge.com/training/course.asp?pageid=9&courseid=9887&methodid=e&country=United+States
Jill
5 Mar 10 at 11:23
hey Aaron, how are you recovering?
I’m starting to study for the ONT, any lab setup tips? what do you think as required equipment?
hope to see your ‘passed the exam’ post soon :)
Rofi
Rofi Neron
14 Mar 10 at 01:08
I’m still moving forward on the studies. After the test, I wrote down all the topics from the tough questions. I then went back to the book to cover that again. I found that a LOT of those topics weren’t even in the book, so I found documentation on CCO and studied those until I was comfortable with them.
In a perfect world, we’d have a set of routers with FXS ports, some analog phones, some IP phones, some LWAPPs, and some WLCs. Of course, we don’t all have $10k for a lab, so that’s out, right? I just did some labs with GNS3; let’s hope that’s enough.
Hopefully, you’ll see the pass post next week. Thanks for the encouragement. :)
Aaron Conaway
14 Mar 10 at 09:38
Right there with you. I failed it too. About the 5th question I had a strong feeling that it was not going well. I will try again in two weeks. tough tough tough.
MJNYC
25 Jun 10 at 20:01