ICND1 Tomorrow

It has been kind of a rough week. I got little done over the Memorial day weekend in regards to study and ended up having to do a 17 hour drive/work/drive last Tuesday. Wednesday I was fairly exhausted and had to make a big decision regarding my upcoming ICND1 exam. I still had several chapters to go in the Odom book as well as a lot of labs in Network Simulator and time was running out. I seriously debated rescheduling the exam date and pushing it out 5-10 days. In the end, I decided to keep the date and really hit the book today. I started early this morning and finished chapter 14, jumped to chapter 19, and completed the reading all the way to the end of chapter 24. I had intended to go back and read the sub-netting chapters but there simply is not enough time at this point and I feel good on sub-netting. I tore through a lot of the remaining NetSim labs and started a Pearson practice exam that was included with the book. This was the second practice exam I took. I took one on the 28th and failed with a score of 667. Tonight I passed with a score of 880, reviewed the questions I missed, and felt pretty good about the whole thing. I missed 5 questions and at least 2 of those were due to question wording. At this point my nerves are shot and I am definitely wanting to get to the exam and get it over. I have not been feeling well today and I am hoping that whatever is ailing me is gone tomorrow.

I will definitely be taking a break for a week to ten days after the exam tomorrow just to recharge my batteries. Hopefully, I will be starting ICND2 studies at that time and not prepping to re-take the ICND1 exam.

48 Hours

In about 48 hours I will be taking the Security+ SY0-301 exam. I finished chapter 11 of Darril Gibson’s book and completed the end of chapter review questions about an an hour ago. This was the last chapter in the book. I combined the end of chapter review questions from chapters 1-11 into one document as I did with the Network+ questions. This will serve as one of my final practice tests. It is approximately 275 questions. The book also had a 100 question final practice exam. I will be taking both of these and using the results to determine any areas I need to re-study. Tomorrow I plan on hitting the iPhone/iPad app pretty hard and really drill myself with it. I also plan on reading the acronym list/glossary at the end of the book. Because of the delay, my final prep time seems a bit more compressed than with the Network+ studying but I feel everything is going to work out. Of course, I’ll know for sure in 48 hours whether I’ve done a good job or not.

Couldn’t wait to take a Security+ practice test

I finished reading chapter 8 of Darril Gibson’s book tonight and once I do the review questions in the morning I’ll be ready for chapter 9. I was getting curious as to how I was doing and wanted to get a little progress measurement so a few minutes ago I went over to the CompTIA site and took the 100 question practice test. Here are the results:

I am encouraged by the result for a couple of reasons:

1. The areas I scored the lowest in are coming up in the next 3 chapters of Darril’s book so I haven’t really even studied that material yet.

2. I remember the practice test for the Network+ exam being harder than the actual exam.

Furthermore, I’l have some additional convergence in the areas of Cryptography and Business Continuity in the near future as those chapters are coming up next in the Ciampa book I am using in my Network Security class.

Overall, I’m feeling fairly good about the Security+ studying. I’m feeling confident at this point but not overconfident.