So, now that you’ve had a chance to read over the EIGRP question and explanations from the last few days, I see that roughly half of the respondents took less than 1 minute to answer Tuesday’s question. Today I’d like to discuss prep strategies that make this kind of question a 30 seconds or less question, and turn this kind of question into an opportunity rather than a time-consuming but answerable question.
The Cisco cert exams have tended more and more over time into the area of “analysis, synthesis, and evaluation” according to the commonly-used Bloom’s taxonomy of learning. While you don’t really need to think about learning theory to do well on the tests, it’s sometimes helpful to think about what Cisco may be asking of the teams that write their exam questions. So, if you go to https://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html, which lists info about Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, and check out the parts in the Cognitive area for “analysis/synthesis/evaluation”, you’ll get an idea of the overarching goals they have for the typical more involved exam question. For example, while you might see one question that just requires you to recall what a term means, other questions might require that you analyze and predict what will occur, which demonstrates a higher level of skill (at least according to learning theory).
This week’s question (see http://www.networkworld.comhttps://www.networkworld.com//community/node/19665) squarely falls into the “evaluate” arena of Bloom’s taxonomy, which is arguably tougher and more time consuming that a question that tests your knowledge or comprehension. For example, an alternative and more basic question might have asked the key components of EIGRP metric calculation, or the definition of a feasible successor, or how the existence of a feasible successor (or not) impacts whether an EIGRP query is sent, or in what conditions EIGRP puts multiple routes in the IP routing table. The single question I posed on Tuesday covers all those concepts to some degree, while also requiring you to evaluate these facts within a particular example.
While the learning theory stuff may not be all that fascinating, here’s a 50,000 feet high view of what all this means to you and me for Cisco exams:
- A single higher-thought question can evaluate your knowledge and skills on a larger mix of topics than the more basic questions.
- A single exam of 50-60 questions, with lots of evaluate/synthesize/analyze type questions, can test a much larger set of knowledge than the same-length exam with a larger number of knowledge/comprehension questions
- By tending more towards the questions that require more skills, Cisco gets a much better measurement of whether we really know this stuff (or not), and protects the certs from becoming “paper” certifications, even as the exam content keeps growing, without having to make the exams take more time
- The exams reward those who can apply their knowledge (the higher thought items on Bloom’s cognitive scale, by the way), which generally means those with experience do relatively better than those who don’t have experience.
Back to this week’s EIGRP question for a moment, then. If you’re ready to apply your knowledge to scenarios that you might not have seen before, then you can actually get a break on the time pressure on the exam, and be more confident as you go through the exam. Fully prepared, this question could be a 30-45 second question for many test takers. For those who know the background facts but haven’t really thought about applying the knowledge, this kind of question can turn into a time-consuming question.
So, it’s Friday, and I’d love to hear from some of you folks today. What do you think would have best prepared you for “evaluate” style applied-knowledge questions like the EIGRP question I posted this week? Is it working with EIGRP in your network? Was it enough for you to know the facts, and you were fine applying the knowledge for the first time when thinking through the simulated question? Would a few examples of showing feasible successors with a real network (and real show commands) help? What else?
I’ll touch on this briefly Monday, and reply to any specific comments as need be – and then probably move on to VTP next week, unless anyone gets me interested in something else by posting a request.
