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.