My CCIE Journey – Chapter 2: The Written Exam

The Written Exam

In some ways, the CCIE R/S Written exam is more of a bear than the lab. It covers an incredible amount of material, far more than the lab exam, though not quite as deep.

Some people advocate studying for the written exam as a matter of course while studying for the lab exam (looking at you, Brian McGahan), the idea being that when you do pass the written exam, you can take the lab exam soon after. I’m going to advise against that, and while I understand that everyone studies differently, I have reasons for advocating that you treat them as different exams.

One: They ARE different exams. The written exam is much more a trivia exam. Know the ports, know the names, fill in the blanks, etc. The depth of knowledge is not extreme, but the breadth of knowledge is farther than any equivalent exam I’ve ever taken. Which brings me to reason number two.

Two: The written exam blueprint is far in excess of the lab exam blueprint. I think anyone who decides to study for the lab and get the written along the way is doing it the hard way because of the scope of the written.

Some of the data necessarily overlaps, but even where it does, the kind of data is different. As an example, I know EIGRP uses protocol 88. I know a stub network replies to incoming queries with an infinite metric for routes it does not own. I know how to calculate variance so that EIGRP will load balance traffic to some ratio between two or more paths that satisfy the feasibility condition. On the written exam, I will probably see one or two questions on the aforementioned knowledge, but its utility will be different as I don’t have access to a CLI and am not configuring it as part of a larger topology. It’s a trivia question, It will read differently and the way I get to the answer is different.

And that is for topics which overlap! Good luck with IS-IS. The written exam has so much data to memorize, that you really need to focus your efforts on it. If you’ve never seen a certain topic, that may be worthwhile to lab a little, to get context and understanding, but I strongly advise that you tackle the written exam as it’s own beast because…

Three: The CCIE journey is like juggling oranges. You’ll study OSPF to the nth degree, know it backwards and forwards, then spend two weeks on BGP, come back and realize you’ve forgotten a ton. Your brain just can’t hold it all at once. It’s been said that the CCIE is a sprint, not a marathon. I think that’s somewhat true but somewhat false as well. Sprinting is needed when it counts, at the end, because there’s a limited amount of time you can juggle all the oranges without forgetting things. This is doubly true of the written exam because of the extreme breadth of topics, and this is the main driver for me to advocate for studying to pass the written exam separately.

I used a number of strategies to study for the R/S written exam. First, I used Narbik Kocharian’s CCIE Study Guide from Cisco Press. Because this book was printed before the Evolving Technologies update I also used Nick Russo’s bi-annual Evolving Technology guide. Speaking of the guide, it not only covers a huge gap left by Cisco Press as far as the written exam blueprint, it also has a ton of useful data. Nick does this on his own and it costs him some scratch to spin up the test beds to demonstrate. If you have any extra quarters lying around, he could use them:

Link to Donate

I also started seriously working on my memory. I actually stopped studying the topics in the blueprint in order to start working on this. It paid off big time for me, but your mileage may vary.

I listened to a few audiobooks on memory techniques while driving to/from work. Some that I’d recommend:

Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and Be More Productive, by Kevin Horsley

Moonwalking With Einstein, by Josh Foer

Based on some strategies within, I started constructing memory palaces. I based one on my old house in Idaho and placed the BGP path preference attributes within. So good is this technique that I can still close my eyes and walk through it today, and I haven’t done it in over a year.

I also started building Mind Maps, and tying the loci to documents/data about the things they represented. This wasn’t as effective as memory palaces but it did prove to be a great way to take notes and recall them. Here are just a few:

I think Multicast is my favorite.. I kept misspelling multicast as multicats whenever I typed it, so.. I just went with it. If you are interested in the others, comment below and I can share them in another post.

Lastly I used Anki to create flashcards. Anki is a free to use (on computer – the phone app costs money) flashcard program which works on the concept of spaced repetition. The idea is that as you see topics again and again, you start to naturally remember them. Anki shows you 20 new flash cards a day (if you have that many) along with some cards you’ve seen before. As you see the cards you can mark them as easier to remember or harder to remember, and Anki will adjust its algorithm to show you more easily remembered cards less, and harder to remember cards more often. This method takes time but is extremely effective at helping you to actually learn data, and retain it over time.

Using these techniques, I was able to pass my written exam on the first try. I didn’t blow it away, but I also didn’t come close to failing.

Next time, I’ll talk about how I approached the lab exam.