ONT - Epic Fail Part 2

I took the ONT again today.  The stench of failure is upon me for a second time, and I’m beginning to think I’m not the god-like person that everyone thinks I am.  I went into the test very confidently.  I did extra time on my weak points from the last attempt and knew it inside and out.  I put hours and hours of lab time in and got other books and online materials involved.  I was absolutely convinced that I would blow this thing away, but, alas, it was not to be.

If you ignore the wireless questions, the test was pretty fair.  There were questions in the usual poor wording that made you doubt things that you know are absolutely true.  Unlike last time, though, I didn’t find any questions where I was totally lost.  There were some questions that were very ambiguous, but only one was out of realm of possibility (it actually required a calculator to answer correctly).  All in all, it was a good test sans the wireless stuff.

Ah, the wireless questions.  I complained last time that there was one needlessly-obscure questions about WLC CLI, and that exact question was on the test today.  The additional CLI questions were downright sadistic, though, and the question about how to do initial configuration was really uncalled for.  Oh, I almost forgot about the question asking what model of WLCs support feature X.  Really?  Has there always been a requirement to know the features of each model in a product line?  I think I got two (maybe three) questions about the technologies like WPA and DCF.

Yes, I know it sounds like I’m making excuses, but I’m not the kind of person who shifts the blame.  If I’m the cause of the problem, I’ll fess up to it.  If I thought I could have done better, I’ll admit it.  If I chose to ignore a topic and get bitten for it, I’ll happily say it was my fault.  In this case, I did more than what I thought was appropriate and still failed.

I believe this puts me far enough behind my schedule to have to take another path to CCNP.  My first reaction would be go the ROUTE/SWITCH/TSHOOT path.  Since I’m already scheduled to take a ROUTE class, it seems the obvious choice.

Hear the Director’s Commentary on this post: