It’s been a long couple of years of medical issues that have stopped me from actually taking the exam, but have studied the material over and over, and finally took it today and passed it on the first attempt.
I have to say that all of the questions on the exam were absolutely outside what I would have expected to see on the exam, I put a lot of focus into areas that weren’t even touched, however I used all the knowledge and labbing you see within this page to make it through the exam!
One thing that almost caught me and probably would have failed me, is to make sure that sim configurations are complete, as I almost skipped over one absolutely necessary line of config on a Sim that would have undoubtedly caused a fail, but I took a few minutes to really think about the entirety of all configs before proceeding and fortunately caught it before proceeding.
The first 10 questions of the exam were the very intensive type (you can probably guess which type those were) which took my entire first hour, and that second hour I had one eyelid half open just shooting from the hip I was so fried from re-reading the scenario / tasks and triple checking everything was satisfied.
The only thing I can really say is, if you know all the material, you should be able to use the same “Answer Elimination” method I’ve used on literally every Cisco exam I’ve ever taken, which is finding a commonality between the wrong answers to get to the logically correct answer among them.
A lot of question / answer question types I wasn’t looking for the correct answers first, I was looking for the obvious wrong answers, and once I eliminated those it made finding the correct answers in the pile of options much easier to conclude.
So happy to have this exam behind me, onto TSHOOT preparation, I wish all you fellow grinders the best of luck with this exam as it fried my brain within the first hour and I honestly didn’t expect to pass at a certain point but my hard work paid off! 😀
The DEVNET GRIND! 
Hi Loopy, congrats with passing the exam. My blind spot are simlets aswell. I keep wondering about two things;
1- Is a exam on a heavily deprecated environment a representation of a real network.
For example “show run int fa1/0” is not allowed.
2- Do you get points rewarded for tasks performed, OR do you not get any points rewarded if
fail one task. (in one simlet)
Just wondering
.
Anyhow, congratulations on this exam and goodluck prepping for the next one.
Happy studying.
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It was not deprecated to a point you couldn’t view the info to correctly answer the questions, but you really need to know your verification commands. HOWEVER, I found myself almost getting the incorrect answer because I needed to run multiple verification commands to see how a certain “scenario” would impact the Topology, so use all show commands at your disposal to fully understand the configurations you are looking at in the Topology.
And I always assume 1 wrong answer means you fail the entire question, so this consumed quite a bit of time for me, getting caught on one iffy question of several in a simlet.
So I’d assume it all or none for all questions with multiple part answers, thank you and good luck to you as well!!!
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Hey Loopy,
My only advice to anyone thinking about passing CCNP Switch exam – do not spend any money on the co called Cisco CCNP 300-115 Certified Guide by D. Hucaby. Book full of mistakes, wrong information (like – accordingly to the book – “if a port is assigned to a vlan and that vlan is later removed from the switch vlan database causes such port to be reassigned back to default vlan”) etc. This book is waste of money and it does not cover lots of things that you will see on the exam (like StackWise switch states and many others) The best way to prepare is to check the blueprint for the exam and use as many sources you can find to learn the material; do not think that buying Cisco Guide cerified by Cisco will be enough. Strange as someone would expect that if a guide is certified by Cisco as the Certified Guide for exam, it covers everything you need and will see sitting the test.
good luck with TSHOOT exam 🙂
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A late thank you for the congrats post here!
I also was taught that concept by another CCNP teacher, I take all of them with a grain of salt, and really rely on labbing things to confirm defaults / behaviors on IOS.
There is no better teacher than the gear itself 🙂 Thank you for the luck on TSHOOT, it is on the horizon quick here, I appreciate it!
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