So I have a dirty little secret that I’m going to let you in on. Until recently the only IT certification that I held was an expired MCP certification dating back to the days of NT4.0. That’s right, I wasn’t a CCanything, and didn’t really see the need. I had years of experience on my resume, and didn’t want to put myself through the emotional distress caused by chasing certifications. There was also the question in the back of my mind: “if I begin taking exams, when do I stop, ccna, ccnp, ccie?”

So for reasons that will be explained later, I decided that it was time to begin the journey to become certifiable certified. Rather than jump directly into the Route, Switch, and Tshoot exams, which I really wanted to do, I instead decided to make myself step through it one step at a time, beginning with ICND1. I spent a week going over the material, just to be certain I knew what to expect, and scheduled the exam.

I wouldn’t say that I have “test anxiety” but anytime you spend $125 on an exam there are going to be strong emotions involved. I went into the exam a little nervous, but still expecting to pass easily.

This brings me to the reason that I HATE certification exams. I was shocked throughout the exam at how many poorly worded questions there were. I felt like I was arguing semantics with someone over whether or not “yes” means “yes” always or just on the odd and even numbered days. It finally led to the question that if I had been in an argument, I would have walked away before resorting to violence.

A loose paraphrase of the question was:

Which are swapped to change a straight-through cable to a crossover cable?
1 and 2
2 and 4
1 and 3
etc.
etc.

Now, the very first answer was “1 and 2” , which I understood to mean “the orange pair that includes wires 1 & 2” so I clicked the check box and then began looking for “3 and 6” to indicate the green pair. The only problem was, there was no “3 and 6” as an answer. I re-read the question, and all of the answers, still no “3 and 6”, I re-re-read, and still no dice.

At this point, I had seen a couple of poor questions or examples, and I was about to chalk this up as “another screw up on this stupid exam” and just click a box so that I could move on. But, I couldn’t stand to be beaten by such a simple question. I re-re-re-read the question, and finally figured out what they were really asking.

The question was really asking which STRANDS, WIRES, or PINS are swapped, not which PAIRS. Why one of those simple words was not used, I cannot tell you. It would have made the 4 minutes I spent on that question less than 20 seconds. At this point I was so frustrated with the many poorly worded questions, I spent 5 minutes writing a comment on this question before I moved on.

By the end of the exam I was sure that I had passed, and when my last two questions were “complex” subnetting questions, I guessed because I didn’t feel like doing the math, and wanted to be done with the exam. I passed with a great score, and ~20 minutes left.

I don’t mind challenging questions. I like to think, and want to know that when I complete an exam I have accomplished something. At the end of the ICND1 exam,  I had figured out what Cisco was TRYING TO ASK enough times to pass. That is all that I feel I accomplished.

Making people decipher and decode poorly written questions does not vet them as a capable certification candidate.

I now know that ICND really stands for “Is Cisco oN Drugs”