When you are preparing for an exam, any exam, the key is to know what you don’t know. No matter what stage you are in your preparation, it’s good to get a grasp on what you know and what you don’t know. This will help you to focus your efforts on areas where you need more time. This is key when studying effectively. This is exactly what the R&S Poly-Lab Assessment was built for. This is a product like none other on the CCIE market.

The poly-lab assessment lab was designed to assess how proficient you are on the topcis covered by the actual Cisco CCIE Routing & Switching Lab. The lab itself is dynamically generated from a enormous pool of tasks.

You can generate a lab from your Internetwork Expert’s members account. Shown in the screenshot above, it is located at the bottom if you click the tab labeled “Mock Labs & ASsessments”. Generating a lab requires 25 tokens and is free for customers who have purchsed the CCIE 2.0 program. Once you are ready to generate your lab, click the link labeled Poly-Lab Assessment homepage.

You can also get to this link by clicking the link in your gradedlabs members account dashboard. The direct link to this location is here.

Following the FAQ (Frequently asked questions) for the poly-lab you will see this section. Note: This poly-lab is generated based on a self-assessment of your knowledge of the different technology topics covered by the CCIE Routing & Switching Blueprint. For the most part, each lab generated is unique to you. Due to the nature of networking, you may see similar patterns appear in your labs as well as some task duplication.

Once we are at the screen shown above, we are ready to generate our specialized lab. It is durning this process that we must assess ourselves to judge our knowledge on these topics. If you have just passed the written CCIE, then you should probably set these sliders to beginner. Doing this just after passing the written exam is a great way to judge where you are with these technologies and where you should focus your studies. If you have been studying for some time now, then you should use the sliders to estimate your proficiency in each technology area. Don’t worry about the SAGE Rank just yet. This will be shown after we have taken the lab.

You will see this when you have placed all your sliders and click “Generate Lab”. To proceed click ok and 25 tokens will be deducted from your account.

After about thirty seconds or so, the page will refresh and you will see the new lab in the My Assessments section. Clicking preview, will show us our newly created lab. Based on my settings it seems that my lab will take 5 hours and 45 minutes. This is an estimate based on the points for each task.

There are 7 sections to the lab, each contains a series of tasks that need to be completed in order to have my lab graded. The next step is to rent a rack session. Since my lab has a suggested duration of 5 hours and 45 minutes, I will be booking out two rack sessions back-to-back in order to complete this lab. Note: Before you start be sure that you are on the same rack for both sessions, this will insure that your rack does not get reset durning the break between sessions.

Once you have rented a session that will cover the duration (Step 1), then previewed the lab (Step 2), and if you have a current session you will see the setup button (Step 3). When you’re ready to take the poly-lab, first click “Setup”.  This process will load your poly-labs initial configurations onto your active rack.  Setting up takes about 15 minutes.  After Setup is complete and you’re ready to start the poly-lab, click “Start”.  This will start the timer for your poly-lab. Once we have finished taking our poly-lab, then click the “Stop” button.  This save your configs and will grade your poly-lab. This grading pracess can take around 5 minutes or more.

We now have a new section in our INE members account, under the Mock Labs & Assessments Tab, “Labs I’ve Completed”. As you can see we now have a score summary in this section. I scored a 96% on my lab, but where did I go wrong? By clicking the More Info… link, we can get a breakdown of every task.

To begin with we have a simple breakdown for each section. This gives us a overall summary of where we should spend more time studying, but how well are we actually doing?

The first thing we have is the Points Per Hour (PPH). The PPH expected for the actual exam is 10. Scoring better than 10PPH is a good idea since you need 80 points to pass the exam and the exam is 8.5 hours of which .5 hours is a lunch break. (1) I have scored 27PPH and (2) the system has broken down my rank by each technology.

The next thing shown are recommended next steps. These are products which can help me getting a better grasp on the specific technology. Though not listed on recommendations, we suggest that you look at our learning capsules if you need more work on a specifict technology. Click here to see a list of our learning capsules.

Ok, I call this the fun part, but it’s really educational. The next part of the score report is a task-by-task analysis. Clicking on the icon next to the score gives you a break down of each assertion. This isn’t to fun if you got the task correct, but if you managed to mess something up, then this can be really quite useful.

It seems that I have missed everything on EIGRP Hub and Spoke. Now, let’s take a look at the assertions.

It seems I have missed R2, and my output is shown in the box. Next I click Show Correct Output to see exactly why I have missed this task.

Now I can see the correct assertions for this task.

This type of analysis is given for each task in the lab. This gives us a great way to determine where we might have messed up something and where we did things right. Overall, going through this process really help in our studies. Ideally, these poly-lab assessments should be taken about 4 or 5 times throughout our study process to guage our readiness for the actual CCIE Routing & Switching Lab Exam. Please post any questions below in the comment box.

Stil not convinced?
View the Poly-Lab FAQ.
Watch Brian McGhan’s V-Seminar as he walks through the poly-lab.

We are running a promotion for people who read our blog.  Save $5 off the poly-lab assessment just by using the discount code: 25082.  What is this number?  Read our previous post.