F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: The art of knowing what you need to know
In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them. With F5’s exams being focused on what you can do in real life, rather than what you know in theory, it makes it difficult to know what exactly you need to know for the exams. Techies don’t like that – we are like binary; we know it or we don’t. We’re not good at blagging (cheeky British term for obtaining through persuasion) our way through a conversation about something we don’t know, so why should exams be any different. Unfortunately, real life doesn't work like that, and neither should exams. This can therefore easily become a stumbling block when preparing for the F5 exams; “I don’t feel I know everything I need to know, so therefore I’m not going for the exam yet.” Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. In this article (part five of eight), I hope to give you some hints and tips on how to find the right information. Everyone has their own ideas on how to work through the material though and I am under no illusion that my way is the best way – whatever works for you, great! Step 1: Blueprint K29900360. The one document to rule them all! A simple document, but oh so powerful! These are the topics that you need to know about and this is the document that the exam developers use to come up with questions (check out a recent article about that if interested). So, think of yourself sitting in the pub with some of your F5 friends and you start talking about these topics; what would you talk about, what could you ask each other? Who knows, see it as a highly specific F5 pub quiz! How simple it may sound, that will probably be the things that you would need to know about Then, looking back on the study guide, the more I already know about a certain topic on the blueprint, the less time I will spend on studying for it. Also remember that the vast majority of questions are about testing if you know the technology and how to apply it in real time, not whether you can remember facts – Google is much better at that! So don’t worry too much about remembering facts, spend more time at playing with the kit! (see our upcoming article for more about that) Step 2: Training and Research If you don’t know what a topic in the blueprint means, go to Google! (other search engines are available – I’m sure Yahoo, Bing or AltaVista may still work…) Simply get a better understanding of what a protocol or function means. Protocol-wise, I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. F5 has a variety of repositories available as well for all kinds of information; Clouddocs,AskF5, DevCentral. – get familiar with them and use them. This is also a good moment to think about training courses, if you haven’t done so already. Although the F5 training courses don’t specifically focus on the exams, they do cover a large variety of topics from the products and give you the chance to play with the kit. Most F5 trainers are also very knowledgeable about their products - they must have passed the respective 300-level exam to be allowed to deliver it after all, so feel free to ask us about it. Step 3: Expand your knowledge You will learn more than you have to for the exams – get over it. Yes, if exam is based on a book, you know exactly what you need to learn and what not. Because we don’t, and we want to make sure that we are covered, you will learn more than you have to. Is that such a bad thing? It wouldn’t be the first time that I get to a consultancy a few weeks after I’ve learned something new and they ask me if I’ve got experience with that specific topic. “Ahyes, sure! I’ve just done a project for this a few weeks ago!” They don’t necessarily have to know that it was a project in my own lab, as long as I understand and have experience with it. If anything, it shows the power of the exam; you expand your knowledge and improve your overall worth! So don’t be afraid to take some detours from the blueprint now and then when you are studying; a lot of that knowledge will come back at some point. If not to better understand the material for this exam, then at least for whatever you will do afterwards – maybe even the next exam! Step 4: Study guides Read the study guides that are available; f5books.eu are supposedly pretty good! They were developed after I’ve finished my 101 and 201, so haven’t used them myself, but have heard great things about them. Step 5: Blueprints Revisited See if the topics make more sense now. If you haven’t done so already, read the example questions that are showing on each section. If anything, it’s a form of cheating to already get these questions; use them! These example questions should be fully understood by now and you should know what technologies they are talking about and how this works with F5. If unsure, build a lab scenario that contains this information. When reading these example questions, you should also know what other technologies are related to this. For example, something that may pop up in an APM exam; understand how the F5 works with AD. Well, that tells me that I need to know the basics of AD, how the F5 works with AD, what troubleshooting tools are available for it and how it normally functions. Besides that, I can imagine that questions about related technologies such as LDAP, Radius and the likes can also be expected. Just now typing in “f5 apm ad” in Google already gives me a nice list of the most common ways to configure and troubleshoot this on the first page. Brilliant! That is my study guide sorted for the next half hour. Once you start reading stuff that either clearly hasn’t got anything to do with it, or you start to read things that you have already read, you are done for now on that topic! Step 6: Shortlist Make a list of any topics that still elude you. There are likely to be some topics that you simply don’t know where to start, or that you cannot find any good resources for. In those cases, Google and the likes are less likely to help you. Speak to colleagues, speak to consultants, trainers, presales, whoever you can find that you can talk to about it some more. It is very likely that you have simply thought of a topic the wrong way around, or have misinterpreted what it means. Someone that knows the technology can explain it to you in a different way, and all of a sudden, it may just click! They can also often give you some information that you simply hadn’t thought about yet, or can fill in other gaps. Don’t be afraid to ask. Even though I have been working with networking and security for over 10 years and I’m supposedly an expert in this area, about 25% of my time still goes on training; reading articles, joining webinars, training sessions and building scenarios – it never ends. The more I can learn from other people, the better! The only idiot here is the person that thinks they know everything. At this late stage, people often start looking for exam dumps. An honest warning; don’t. Not only are they likely to be either old exams, practice exams or just nonsense questions, you are also likely to get the wrong information because of it. Just because someone somewhere has said that for this question, this must be the right answer, it doesn’t mean it’s true. Ah, the good old days when information on the internet could be trusted. Always check for yourself and know your stuff. Better still, stay away from exam dumps altogether as they negate the effectiveness of any exam and degrade the quality of your hard-earned certificates. In addition, F5 spends quite a bit of effort on tracking unsavoury behaviour by test takers and the like (for good reason!) and I’d hate for anyone to be barred from the program because you got a bit lazy. Step 7: Relax Because of the scenario-based nature of the questions, people tend to do quite well on the exam or pretty badly. Which if I’m correct, should translate in a better spread of the overall exam results. Combine this with the knowledge that you can’t really cheat on the exam and that the exam doesn’t have to trick you to test your knowledge, and you will find that the pass mark for F5 exams are also be reasonably low. If you get a few things wrong, no worries – that’s part of the process. If you forget some protocols during the day, meh, you’ll be fine. So, get preparing… As long as you’ve done your due-diligence beforehand and tried your best to cover all topics, you’ll do fine during the exam as well. Good luck! Dr. Ken Says... In regard to the “examples” given on the blueprints, it is important that candidates understand this is not an exhaustive list of the knowledge, they are simply what they say they are: examples. If, after failing the exam, you come back to me and say, “such and such wasn’t on the blueprint, but it was on the exam”, you are: a) incorrect, because the blueprints are constantly consulted and verified by numerous experts using a rigorous process while the exam is being developed; and, b) not qualified and the exam results correctly reflected that. I really hate to say it, but feedback on the exams, especially in regard to the validity/veracity of the questions, doesn’t really mean much if you have just failed the exam. I know we all would prefer for someone else to be at fault, but if you don’t know the material enough to pass the exam, then you don’t know the material enough to provide a qualified review of the exam. That being said, if you pass the exam but still think there are issues with a question: tell us. We are not perfect, but it is not from a lack of trying.F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: How to take the stress out of the F5 exams
F5's certification exams are awesome; a good way to test and prove your skills and worldwide recognized. But they are not easy! And neither should they be. Unfortunately, because of their structure and time limits, many people struggle to pass them or simply don't want to take them. There are many people out there that are brilliant with F5's, but don’t have anything to show for it. Not to say that everyone should have the certification, but if you know your stuff and you want to show it, there shouldn't be anything stopping you. In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them. With some preparation and the right mind set, everyone can have a better chance of passing these exams and show them off to the world! After all, the exams should not be a test to see if you can work under pressure (you can leave that to your boss), but instead to prove that you know your F5's! Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. ...and why should I listen to you? After saying bye to the railways in 2009, I picked up my old hobby of networking, by studying for Cisco’s CCNP and CCDP exams. I loved every minute of it, and loved the technology, but unfortunately, as this was the height of the financial crisis, nobody was looking for Cisco engineers that couldn’t prove they have practical experience. More than once did recruiters hang up on me mid-sentence; “Well, I can’t prove my experience, but I do have the certific….”. Even to recruiters it was clear that having the certificates on their own is not good enough. Anyway, luckily I got employed in a small town of rural England on a European wide helpdesk that looked after basically all vendors similar to Cisco, apart from Cisco itself. And as the company had to have a certain level of certified engineers in various technologies, the deal with my manager was simple; he will keep sending me on training courses, as long as I keep passing the exams. Oh, and those Cisco certs? “Yeah, they’re nice, but only tells me that you have an interest in the technology, not that you actually know your stuff…” So, over the next couple of years I turned in to a certification monkey; Juniper JNCIS-Sec, JNCIS-Ent, JNCIS-SSL, PaloAlto ACE, BlueCoat BCCPP, Checkpoint CCSA, VMware VCP-NV, Ruckus WiseGuy, I’ve done them all… With varying levels of success and enjoyment, but one thing clear between all of them; as long as I read the book and followed the standard course, I could pass them! So when F5 brought out their new certification program, there was one sucker in particular that was kindly but firmly asked to pass the exams. Gmbmglrmlbn… stupid F5’s, I don’t like that stuff… bgmbmrrn…. Ok… (Ross, if you are reading this, I still owe you my gratitude for “forcing” me into F5… ;) When starting to get stuck into this technology, one thing became clear early on; just sitting on training courses and reading the books didn’t make me pass them! Hmm, that’s a new one! Although to be fair, the 101 I passed roughly based on all my previous knowledge and hardly picking up a book – that already showed me the opposite is true as well; if you know your stuff, you don’t have to study! Moving through the exams and the structure, I also started to enjoy working with the kit and now I can’t leave it alone. This prompted me to move from helpdesk to presales, to training and consultancies. From someone who hated F5 to someone who’s just a massive fanboy – that’s my life… Having passed 401 and 402 and all intermediate exams (including the elusive 202!), I look back at these exams and compare them to all the other ones I’ve done, I can honestly say that these are the best structured and most worthwhile exams out there. There are exams out there that are purely paper exercises, some that are nothing more than a checkbox exercise and some that are purely there to generate cash. Not to say there are no other worthwhile exams out there, but the F5 program is definitely one of the better ones! …so what’s your idea? I’d like to tell you about my experiences running through all kinds of exams, and in particular F5 exams and how to best prepare yourself for them, and give yourself the best opportunity to make sure that your technical knowledge prevails during your actual exam, rather than your fears, stress and other distractions. With my lovely wife now having been infected with the F5 bug as well, and having started her own certification path – or maybe she just does it so I may finally shut up about it… - I thought I might as well write all this down. Dr. Ken Says... The only comment I have here is in regard to the statement, “the exams should not be a test to see if you can work under pressure”. While I believe the sentiment was well-founded, it is not entirely correct. Time constraint is absolutely an element of our assessment process; thus, some amount of “work[ing] under pressure” is inherently present. “Expert” practitioners generally require less time to evaluate and apply their knowledge; they require less “input” in order to identify the scope of the problem, the key aspects affecting the problem, and the likely causes. As such, we have intentionally limited the amount of time on our exams to better identify those that can consistently perform within an “average” amount of time, versus those that get stuck. This is a key element of the assessment process. At the end of the day, when an employer sees someone with an F5 certification, they should know that the individual can consistently solve problems in an efficient manner, saving time/money in the long-run. We think this adds significant value in having our certifications. Over the next weeks, I’ll be highlighting the best ways to prepare yourself for the exam, how the exam development process works, how this helps you better understand the exam, and how to deal with time pressure. I will keep my technical recommendations to a minimum, simply because there are lots of good resources available out there that can help with that, and I rather focus on various areas of the “softer” side of the exam. Of course, if anyone DOES want to talk more about the technical side of it, I’m all ears! I hope these articles are useful, and just as a disclaimer; all notes and opinions in these articles are mine and mine alone. Hopefully you (and F5?) agree with them, but if not, please do not hesitate to let me know. May the 401 be with you!F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: The cool side of the exam development process
In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them. In this article (part four of eight), I will share some insights in how they (F5) come up with the exam questions and how to use this to your advantage. Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to have been able to participate in the development of some of the F5 exams and get an insight in the workings of them. My top tip; if you ever get the chance to help with the exam development process – I would highly recommend it! One of the strong points of the F5 exams is that they are developed by a bunch of industry experts, rather than “some idiot with a book”. I’ve seen many exam questions myself over the years that are asking for such obscure knowledge that the only way to answer it correctly is to have read the exact book that the question comes from. What a waste… You have just proven that someone can read a book! (and to be honest, in real life you’ve got Google to tell you that stuff anyway) Having a bunch of people from around the world work together and come up with questions makes for a much more varied and scenario-based experience. Think about developers, consultants, support engineers and all those. They are speaking from their own experiences when writing questions, and if you ever find a question that thinly-veiled asks how “an F5 engineer has misconfigured something, what may have caused this” – you bet that that person was speaking from their own experience… Once someone has come up with a good question, it gets shown to the rest of the group; who of you can answer this question? There are normally about 10-15 people in a room, the facilitator would expect that at least half to three-quarters of all people should be able to spot the right answer. If everybody can quickly guess the right answer, it’s clearly too easy, if nobody can spot the right answer, it’s clearly too hard. It’s a first test to check a question’s validity, but a pretty good one in my eyes! Not that this is the whole process – not by a long shot! (and I’m sure I will get beaten up for making it sound so simple…) After this, questions first go into a beta exam program, all kinds of funky data analysis will be done on it and any comments from real test-takers assessed, before it may actually make it into the real exam. So if a question makes it to the real exam, you can be pretty certain that it makes sense and they are not trying to catch you out! Saying that, if you don’t agree with questions during an exam, feel free to leave comments. Every question has a comments field, so feel free to use it and they do read them. Unfortunately, your exam timer does not stop when writing comments, so be quick. I believe in Beta exams you get an extra ten minutes or so afterwards to fill in comments. This brings me to the Practice Exam. This is a facility that is available for you when you sign up to the exam certification process. Something like 25 dollars for a go, and a nice facility to have available. Personally, I’m not a big fan of it, but it does have its place; if you want to get a feel for whether you are ready for the real thing, and want to get an idea of what the exam actually looks like, feel free to give it a go. As you will likely get the same set of questions (none of which are on the real exam), there is also no point in doing it more than once really. You just start to remember the questions, instead of the topics. There are also some no-no’s when it comes to writing the question, the correct answer and the “distractors” – a cool term for the wrong answers. Such as: Questions are not meant to catch you out. If an answer looks like the right one, it probably is. If you have two or more answers that look pretty good to you (and you only need one), then you probably will have missed something, rather than the exam trying to play a trick on you. Someone who just walks in with no knowledge of the exam, should NOT be able to guess the right answer. For example; “From what direction does the wind blow?” A: North, B: South, C: West, D: It depends on the weather of that moment.” In other words, is the question idiot proof? The distractors can NOT be correct in certain cases. It needs to be clear from the question that only one answer can be correct. Don’t make the question overly complex and don’t use double negatives. The exam is to test your F5 knowledge, not to test if someone can read. In fact, with the exam being taken worldwide, the simpler the language used, the better. And remember, simple to read questions doesn’t mean a simple question to answer - “How many stars are there in the Universe?” F5 works with a measurement called a Minimally Qualified Candidate (MQC), which means a person who is JUST competent enough to not be fired. They should be able to pass the exam. The exam is not checking if you are the best in your field. As such, questions will not be checking if you know about this obscure knowledge that you only learned on page 275 of the book, or which you must have seen once while working in the dark pits of a datacentre during a blackout. F5 has something called the Wheel of Validity (it almost sounds like a game show!) which they use during the exam development process, and always hold it against what they want to really test. Starting with the subject of the exam this will turn into the blueprint, an assessment of how often these topics are actually popping up in real life, and followed by the questions per category. Even the number of questions per category being dependent on the importance of a category. See it as a risk assessment. If you normally do a certain F5 task only once a year, and if it goes wrong, nobody cares, it’s clearly not THAT important to have it right. Whereas if you have a job to do every week that MUST be done right, otherwise the place burns down, you better know what you are doing! The latter subject will therefore result into more questions. Many moons ago, when I had a quick chat with them, I mentioned that I was surprised to get quite a number of questions in my 201 exam about raising a support ticket. As it turned out – at least back then, that it is something that many people need to do “regularly” and it often goes wrong! Apparently raising a priority 1 call in the middle of the night to sort out a minor lab issue is not the nice thing to do. …but I digress. If you want to know more about what’s going in to the exam development process, there are a few really good videos / interviews with the brains behind the exam process on the DevCentral YouTube channel, such as the one embedded below – it shows you how much work goes into delivering a few lines of text on your screen while you are sitting there and sweating over them. Dr. Ken Says... There’s a lot in this post; and, while, yes from my perspective it is extremely simplified, it does capture the gist of how we put every effort into making the exams do one thing: determine if someone is minimally qualified or not. That is the only goal. I did want to clarify two things: the minimally qualified candidate (MQC), and the value of practice exams. MQC: This is not an F5 concept, but a standard concept in psychometric assessment development; and, while it sounds a bit incongruent or backwards, it is extremely important. Defining the MQC means detailing, exactly, how much knowledge we require before we are confident to allow the individual to do something. It is drawing a line in the sand saying, “if you know, at least this much, then we will trust you to do the job.” There are thousands, or millions, of minimally qualified airline pilots, brain surgeons, teachers, etc. practicing their professions today. It is really about simply defining the line between feeling confident you can do the job or not. This is also why our exams are pass/fail: you either make the mark or you don’t. We don’t actually care if you know more than the MQC, we just need to know whether you know enough to be one. Practice Exams: I know practice exams are somewhat of a contentious topic, but I believe that is because most people only know them in the way they have been used for many years: a list of questions that people study and review as a “learning” tool. Our practice exams are not designed for that. Our practice exams are built using the same process as our production (i.e. “real”) exams; in fact, we could easily use the practice exam for the real exam as it is equated (i.e., “identical” to the real exams in terms of number of questions, construction, and difficulty) to the real exams. The only difference is that it does not have the same questions. The value of this is that candidates taking the practice exam can get the same information (passing/failing, which sections they need to work on, same time constraints, understanding the style of questions, etc.) all without having the cost of taking the real exam and without it affecting your retake status. This is all extremely valuable, and I’ve known many a candidate who has just taken the real exam (from many vendors) just to get this information. The one caveat, as pointed out in the article, is the value of the practice exam diminishes each time you take it as there is only one set of practice exam questions. The more times you take the practice exam, the less the results will reflect your real exam performance. For that reason, we suggest using the practice exam only two (at most three) times; after that, the results will simply tell you how well you know the questions, rather than the material underneath.F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: Congratulations, you have failed!
In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them.Everyone fails an exam every now and then - my exam history is a definite testament to that. If you never fail an exam, I suspect you spend more time on preparing for an exam than you really should. Let’s have a look at some of things you can do so that it doesn’t happen too often though. Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. Let’s try again! F5’s exam policy (https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K90101564) stipulates when you are allowed to retake exams again; wait 15 days after first fail, 30 days after second, 45 after third and a year after fourth. This has been done to ensure that nobody will keep doing the exam in the hope of memorizing questions and passing by accident. I quite agree with that. Still, everyone can have a bad day, and everyone will fail every now and then – as I said, my own exam history is a perfect example of that. But when you fail, don’t let that keep you from trying again! Here is how I look at the number of tries: First time failed? Meh, nobody cares, everyone fails now and then. Brush up on what you think may be missing and see if you can find some other sources of material. Second time failed? Not to worry, hope you have recognised the areas that you need to focus on and you better rebuild some of the scenarios in your lab or find some more study material for those areas. Third time failed? Okay, you really need to straighten up now and prove that you are actually trying! Fourth fail? You may want to rethink your career plans. I will leave it up to you to decide when is a good time to try again, but don’t put it off too far, or it will be “conveniently” forgotten about. If it was worth doing it a first time, it’s worth trying again. “It is better to have tried and failed, than to have never tried at all” Wait, is that how that saying goes? But it is right. I’m not saying waste your tries, but don’t hold back either, failing isn’t such a bad thing! Learn from your mistakes Although your initial result at the exam centre doesn’t tell you your score, once the results have been uploaded to F5, you should find your exam score in the Exam History section of the Certification portal (https://certification.f5.com/). I believe that nowadays the exam score runs from 100-350 points with 245 (or in hex…F5!) being the passing mark. It’s not much consolation, but knowing how close you are to the passing mark, gives you an indication of how much extra work you should be putting into preparing for the next time. If you were close to the pass mark, you should have a good feeling of which questions you were struggling with and what topics you didn’t know enough about. If you can’t remember, it's likely that everything was difficult and you are best off starting from the beginning again. Remember, these exams are designed to distinguish between those who can and those who cannot. So if you were just “wingin’ it”, you'll get beaten up by the exam. Go back to the blueprint and see if you can match up those topics you were struggling with. That’s your starting point for the next phase. What to change? When you are going back to your study material to find out what you have missed, don’t stick with just the same material. My daughter being a prime example who keeps doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. “But I’m trying!” No you’re not, you are just too stubborn to stand back for a few seconds and think about what you are trying to do, and changing it if needed – oh how I recognise my younger self in her... Just like the hackers that are trying to attack your F5 really. If they notice that an attack doesn’t work, they will change their approach – no point in trying something that doesn’t work. So should you change tack too. The material you may be using might not be of the level you require. Maybe you are just not understanding what the material is trying say, or the material is simply not covering the topics that you need. Find some other resources to study, ask some other people for help and build out some more scenarios in your lab. If you do this right, I am certain that there will be a few times that you say “aaahhh, of course, that’s what I missed” when you go through it. Of course there is no guarantee that you will get the same questions again next time around, but you have at least covered off yet another gap in your knowledge, and have gone on to improve yourself – and isn’t that what the whole certification program is for anyway? A few years ago, I coached someone for the 401 exam. He had a great background in networking and security, but limited knowledge of F5’s. He managed to pass most of the 300-level exams in a few months’ time! By the time we met, he was ready for the 401. After spending a day with him talking about a variety of topics, and letting him lab up various scenarios for a week, he sat the 401 exam…. And failed. Meh, no real problem, we had another chat afterwards, discussed some of the topics he recognised he was struggling with, spend another week in the lab, …and passed! Well done and well deserved for sure! Before you ask, no, I do not suspect any foul play. I have never seen such a feat repeated again and am still in awe of this guy’s brilliance. (If you read this, you know who you are...) For most of us, that's not the case though and we actually have to make an effort... ;) Long story short, for me that was a perfect example of someone used to passing, but still failing from time to time. Meh, it happens, brush yourself off, learn from your mistakes, try again and succeed! Dr. Ken Says... Many will know that I spent many years pursuing certifications when I worked as an engineer. In the many, many exams I took, I only ever failed two exams. The first one was Novell 4.0 print services (yes, that dates me a bit), which I took a second time and passed. The other was F5’s 201: TMOS Administration exam. For context, I have been with F5 for over 21-years now and my original role was as a field systems/sales engineer: I sold, designed, installed, and provided support on F5 systems around the globe. My second role was as one of the first “Security Architects” at F5, working with TrafficShield and FirePass (again, dating me a bit if you recognize the product names). I was, I believe anyway, a fairly well-respected F5 engineer. The point being … I’m no novice when it comes to F5 equipment. So, why did I fail 201? I failed 201 because it I took it nearly a decade after I quit working as a full-time F5 engineer. Not only had many things changed, but knowledge and skill are perishable; they decline over time. While I didn’t fail 201 by much (and I didn’t study for it at all), the assessment correctly determined that I was no longer capable of doing the job. Yes, it hurt my ego a little, but I’ll have to admit it was a fair assessment. I wouldn’t hire me to do the job anymore either. As the author intimates, failing an exam doesn’t make you a failure, it just means you need to work a bit more to pass the exam; it’s not personal. In case you’re wondering, no I haven’t retaken exam 201. Primarily, it is because I don’t do the job and having the F5-CA, BIG-IP doesn’t have much value in my current role. At the same time, I will admit that I like to tell this story because it underscores the validity of the assessment, and why we have some of the policies we have. 2-year renewal; knowledge is perishable. Complain to me that you can’t pass an exam even though you’ve worked with F5 gear for 10-years; you and me both!! Note: For another perspective on pushing through, check out Peter Silva's successful failure with the 201 exam .F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: You need to study? Stop reading and start building
In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them.One of the biggest killers in F5 exams is the time pressure. Most of the ones that I’ve done, I’ve ran out of time, and no, not just the 400 levels. I believe that I had the same problem when recertifying my 202 recently. Why is that? Well, apart from me maybe just not being as good at this stuff as some of you, I do believe it has something to do with what the exam is testing; can you figure out real life stuff, rather than regurgitating facts. Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. As mentioned in my previous article; the exams are scenario-based rather than knowledge-based. With knowledge-based questions, it’s easy; you know it or you don’t. No matter how much time you are given, it won’t influence your answer. With scenario-based questions, it’s quite the opposite; if I give you enough time, you should be able to figure most of the stuff out. The difference between a good engineer and a bad one, is not that the good engineer knows more. For me, a good engineer can quickly spot where a problem MAY lie in a complex environment, and how to start testing for things to get to the bottom of problems quickly. Nobody walks in to a problem and just “knows” what the answer is. Okay, unless they are the ones that have caused the problem to begin with, but maybe we’ll leave that one for another day. So, in order to really understand the stuff you are dealing with on the exams, you NEED a lab. The 101 maybe not yet, and you could wing it through the 200 level exam(s) without it, but the 300-level and upwards, you don’t really have a choice. Having hands-on experience immediately helps you recognise scenarios, certain features and their behaviour as well as general experience of how things work in real life. What to put in a lab? An F5… or 2. I’ve got about 40 F5’s, together with a bunch of BigIQ’s, but I wouldn’t recommend that to the average user. A physical F5 is not needed and is very noisy, so no point in going for those (…unless your lovely boss gives you access to them of course!) If you have the capacity to run a few systems on your laptop, great, but keep in mind that you will need at least a few servers running at a time, which often overwhelms all but the best of laptops. Instead, have a look around eBay and the likes for some cheap second-hand servers. There are often all kinds of devices lying around with a wide range of specs and at various prices. If you are in the UK/EU, I love these guys: https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk/* If you are lucky, you can find some high-spec silent servers if peace and quiet is a must for you, but even some basic servers are often good enough. I am running all my kit on a bunch of second-hand cloud servers that I bought for about 500 dollars each – and that included 128GB ram and 16 CPU cores! Finally, grab a bunch of el-cheapo hard drives from eBay* and you are all sorted! I’m not saying it’s cheap, but having a decent lab environment doesn’t have to cost the earth. As a hypervisor, you can basically take whatever you prefer, but I’m a big fan of Proxmox*, a free hypervisor that is very easy to set up and highly scalable Of course, if you like their work, buying a support license would always be nice! Once that’s up-and-running, it’s time to start building VM’s! For anyone with a partner F5 account, there is the vLab section on the F5 Downloads page. For anyone who works at an F5 partner, but doesn’t see the vLab section at the bottom of the page, have a chat with your account manager of presales contact. This page contains the images of some backend servers, as well as a big package of demos and exercise guides – gold dust really! For anyone else, I’d recommend just building a server yourself using an Ubuntu image, or if you have gone for Proxmox, you can download preconfigured webserver containers in a few minutes. The only thing you then need, are a few F5 boxes. You can get lab licenses for about 100-200 dollars (a great investment), or you can request trial licenses via https://www.f5.com/trials - so no reason to not have them. With these licenses, you can download the F5 images from the Downloads page and you should be ready to go! Here is a trick by the way for getting a few lab licenses paid for by your boss; “Everybody has a lab, some people are lucky enough to have a lab that’s separate from their live environment.” – I can’t remember where I heard this quote first, but it sure will make your boss shiver and pay up quickly! Even the process of building the lab is already a good exercise for the exam to be honest. It will bring back your networking skills, your troubleshooting skills when things eventually go wrong and your cloud skills of course! When you have a good setup, I can also recommend taking a few snapshots of your systems, so you can always rollback to a working state of your systems – it’s pretty painful if you have been playing with the kit, have got it all stuck and have no clue on how to recover from it (yet). Being able to roll back to a working state will save you lots of time and frustration. What to do now? …whatever you want, really. The blueprint (see a previous article) should give you some indications on what you still need to learn about certain topics. Also see if you can indeed find that package of lab guides under the vLab section of the Downloads page. If you still have any old manuals from training courses, that’s also perfect. Or last but not least, have a look here: https://clouddocs.f5.com/training/community/ There is a treasure trove of good lab exercises available. Software upgrades are also a good one to practise in the lab, and how to do this in clustered setups, with different modules and different upgrade paths. Okay, not necessarily all required for the exams, but still something that may come in very handy next time you need to do an upgrade in your live environment. Talking about software versions; every exam is linked to a specific version of software (the blueprint will tell you what version it is based on), but to be honest, don’t worry too much about it. The vast majority of questions are version-agnostic, so there shouldn’t be any questions that ask you about a specific command structure that only is available in very specific versions of software. But since they HAVE TO decide on a software version that is valid for all questions, they normally pick the one that is leading at that moment. As a last closing thought, you may now wonder that, if it is so important to have a lab for the exams, then why are all exams multiple-choice and is there no lab-based exam? I was curious about that myself at first, until it became clear to me that these multiple-choice questions ARE testing your lab skills because of their scenario-based questions. On top of that, it was explained to me that if F5 were to have lab-based exams, there would only be a few locations worldwide where this would be possible, and likely at an increased cost. This negates one of the principles behind the F5 exam program; anyone worldwide with the right skills, should be able to sit and pass an exam irrespective of your background or financial means. Something I fully agree with – F5 to all! Dr. Ken Says... This article approaches one of the topics near and dear to my academic research. It is all about the difference between knowing “what” (facts and bits of knowledge), and knowing “how” (how all those pieces fit together into a whole). As the author has stated numerous times, you can get “what” from Google, but that doesn’t mean you know “how” to use that knowledge. While each person requires a different amount of experience to develop expert know-how, very few will ever get this simply from reading a book; you have to practice implementing that knowledge before your brain transforms it into a highly efficient “mental model” of how it all fits together. Once that is done, you have become an expert and will approach problem solving in an entirely new way. To wit, the author mentions the dissonance between having lab skills but using multiple-choice questions to test that knowledge/skill. There is no disconnect here. Our questions are designed to evaluate a candidate’s mental model, not whether they can type fast or manipulate a GUI. It is just as simple, and more cost effective, to ask questions that determine if a candidate has done the work, than design an environment to test them doing it. One issue I have with practical exams is they not only test what you “know”, but they expect you to implement that knowledge the way we would, rather than being open to novel or innovative solutions. As such, they inadvertently limit what might be “correct”, simply because it is based on our perspective rather than being open to equally correct solutions that are accomplished in new and interesting ways. The goal should always be to determine whether the individual has the knowledge and the ability to implement that knowledge, not whether they implement it solely the way we would. It’s nuanced, but it is important. *Disclaimer; I have no affiliation with any of the sites/products I mention in this post. I’m happy with them at the time of writing, but things can change of course. If you like them, great! If you don’t, great!F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: Flag your way through the exam without raising the white one
In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them. In this article, I will share with you a tool of the gods: the flag. It's such a simple function; put a little flag on the screen to keep your place. Knowing how you can get the most out of it can make the difference between you stressing all the way through and sitting there relaxed as if you were filling in a questionnaire about the sandwich you just had. Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. Let’s back up a bit first Many moons ago when I was working through my Cisco exams, there used to be as multiple choice questions as well as “Simlets” – small simulation items that were checking if you knew the procedure for configuring certain items. I don’t know if Cisco exams still have them, but I used to dread them. You would have about 3 or 4 of them in an exam, and you would have to configure something in a simulation, or fix a problem. You wouldn’t know at which question they would pop up and because they were supposedly quite heavily scored, it means that missing one will already reduce your chances of passing. Missing two and you’d better be REALLY good at the rest. One fateful day, sitting one of the CCNP module exams, I believe I got 3 of them within my first 5 questions! Oh bugger… Of my 90 minutes, I think I only had 45 or so minutes left when I got passed them; I didn’t want to skip them because of their importance, but I also didn’t want to spend too much time on them. Oh, did I mention you can’t go back to questions in these exams once you have answered them? I wasn’t looking like a happy bunny when I finally got passed those first 5 questions. I might as well have given up right there and then as there was no chance of keeping my stress levels under control after that – what a waste… To be fair to the exams, I did pass this test a few weeks later, and this particular scenario only happened to me once, but it almost felt like being cheated out of a “pass”. This is one of the reasons why I appreciate the option to go back to previous questions in F5 exams so much more. If you have a difficult question, or don’t want to spend the time on reading something right now, no problem! Flag the item, select an answer if you wish, and move on! At the end of the exam, you get a review screen where you get a chance to revisit all your questions and see how many you have answered, how many you have flagged and how much time you have left. The only thing that’s missing here is an overview of how many questions you have right – wouldn’t that be helpful! Let’s talk strategy! So, here is my plan; when I start the exam, I answer all the short and simple questions. Any large question with exhibits or large pieces of text, I just flag and move on. Any short question that I have read and THINK I may know, I answer and also flag. After about half the exam time, I then end up on the final review screen. There is something serene about this screen for some reason – seeing it drops my stress levels and gives me a moment to breathe. This might also be a good moment to indeed take a deep breath; congratulations on not failing so far! My review screen should now roughly be filled with 20-30% of questions unanswered, and 40-50% of questions flagged. First, let’s have a look at the unanswered questions – if anything, those are you easy points. Now is the time to read them properly and pick a sensible answer. If you still can’t figure out the right answer, no problem! At least pick the best suiting answer, but leave the flag. Get back to the review screen and pick another one. Remember, there is no penalty for going back to the same question again and again – other than a small time penalty when you find out you’ve already tried that one. Work your way through these unanswered questions and remove the flags of any answers you are happy with. Of that 30% unanswered questions, you should now have all of them answered, and most of them will no longer be flagged. So, all the flagged questions you have left now - probably still about 25% of all questions - are questions you have seen before, have taken the time to read them and given it your best shot. Let’s now revisit this lot, one by one and review the questions again. This is where you may want to make a bit of a judgement call depending on how much time you have left. If you have lots of time left (i.e. more than 10 minutes), take your time to read through these questions again and see if you can come up with a better answer. If you only have a few minutes left, unflag any question that you know you are struggling with and are unlikely to improve in any way and use the time you have left on the questions that you DO have a chance with. Of course, also keep in mind that often when you revisit a question and don’t quite read the whole question, you may end up misreading it and changing the answer to the WRONG answer… - so don’t rush! All questions already have an answer and you should already have passed, so whatever you are doing now, is purely for bonus points. Lastly, with this strategy, I also don’t expect to be able revisit all flagged items. During my last recertification – I believe it was the 402 again, I ran out of time with still about 10-20 questions flagged for review. I was absolutely knackered, but I passed! Remember, they are not testing if you can have everything right, they are testing if you are good enough to call yourself an F5 specialist! Flagging for Professionals Here is a tip for anyone going for the 400-level exams; how to deal with Case Studies! Case studies are sets of questions that are all based around the same company/scenario. You need to read the scenario first, then read the questions and pick an answer. As I understand it, F5 has tried to put all case study questions at the same spot in the exam, but apparently the exam software doesn’t allow for this. As such, you may get case study questions dotted around the exam, which means you need to read the whole case before you are able to remember the details you need and answer the questions – quite a waste of time. How about you try this; the moment I find one of these, I put them on my notes paper (you should get a few pages before entering the exam room), and make a note of the exam question number, and which case study it is for. Flag and move on, don’t try to read it, remember it or glance at it – LEAVE IT! Once you are at the review screen, you can then pick up all questions from a specific case study at once; you take your time to read through the text and “easily” answer all the questions. Doing it in this way, will also make it less likely that you start confusing the different case studies and scenarios. So, that’s it. If you now come to the end of this article and were expecting some grand finale, my apologies. None of these tips are really shocking or brilliantly thought out. But at least in my experience, these little things can make the difference between dreading the process and just waiting for the exam to be over and being comfortable and having a good chance in making it. Let’s see who can use the most flags! Dr. Ken Says... I have suggested many of these strategies over the years based on my own test-taking experiences, so I’m glad that at least one person also finds them useful. One thing I will point out is that, at least in the current exam structure, all the questions are equal in value, and the passing score is determined by the overall number of correct questions. That is to say, you need to correctly answer a certain number of questions, but it doesn’t really matter which questions they are, or that you have to even answer all of the questions in order to pass the exam. I point this out because, when it comes to time management, it can help ease the tension (and improve the score) if you follow some of these tips. By answering all the “easy” questions first, you not only save up extra time for the harder/longer questions, but you increase the likelihood of maximizing the number of correct “easy” items. Then, with the extra time you have, you can knock out the rest. If you run out of time … you’ve at least answered the bulk of the questions and may not even need the remaining ones. While this may seem like “gaming the system”, we: a) know many of our candidates will do everything they can to do so anyway (it’ kind of our nature); and, b) our exams are designed in such a way that it shouldn’t make any difference in terms of passing someone who isn’t qualified. We only care about how you do on the assessment “overall”, not how you approach it.F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: Congratulations, you have passed!
In this series of articles, I have gone into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them. And now that you have,enjoy! Enjoy the rest of the day, and soak up the rays of a job well done! Second, party! Third, tell everyone about it! Especially us techies aren’t good at boasting about our achievements, but passing these F5 exams, I would definitely call an achievement. Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. Once the celebrations are over, you should also receive your mail from F5 to confirm that they have ratified your results – assuming you haven’t tried to do something nasty. With this, you can then look online to check your passing score, which will give you an indication of how close you were (https://certification.f5.com/). Keep in mind the MQC (Minimally Qualified Candidate) metric that F5 uses – no matter if you have barely passed or easily passed, you have passed! And when it comes to telling people about it – they really don’t care. As another wise colleague once said; “boast about the fact that you made it, not about how closely you almost didn’t pass.” Badges are also a useful feature. On the same site, you will be able to find them and you can show them to the world! Most exams nowadays have it, but if anyone ever asks you to confirm that you indeed have this exam, you can send them the badge, which links to the F5 page that confirms that this certification is still valid. Too many people have been boasting about certificates that they don’t actually have, or are no longer valid. This validation system is a great way to confirm from the source that you still have the accreditation. What’s next? Not to say you have to change your job, but as we have now seen, these certifications are worth their time and money and if you were thinking about looking for something better, now might be the right time to do it! Of course, good managers will recognise potential before it leaves the building and will happily give you the work (and hopefully pay rise) that comes with it. In my case, the F5 certifications helped me to leave my 24/7 helpdesk job and move into presales, then training, and nowadays running my own business. Even if you don’t immediately want to change or take on the new skills, you can still take pride in the knowledge that you know your stuff. And why not take this further? Which exam are you looking at next? I’m aware that there’s lots of other exams to be had, but if you are enjoying these, why not try some more? Each 300 level exam gives you access to more opportunities and options. Going for a 400-level one will only expand on that, with the added bonus that you can do less exams every time when renewal comes up. Talking about renewals; in order to keep your certification valid, you need to renew them roughly every two years. Though with the recent lockdowns, F5 has extended the validity of most certifications so that nobody would be uncertified due to not being able to sit the exam. Dr. Ken Clarifies... F5 has not “extended the validity of most certifications so that nobody would be uncertified due to not being able to sit the exam”. We extended the “grace period”. The difference is subtle, but it is critical. Certifications expiring during the pandemic will still expire and, once expired, they cannot be used to satisfy the prerequisites of a higher-level exam/certification. Extending the grace period simply gives candidates more time to renew those certifications without having to go all the way back to exam 101. ALSO, taking a higher-level “exam” will not renew any prerequisite certifications. Achieving a higher-level “certification” will. Again, it is subtle, but can be important. Passing exam 302 confers the F5-CTS, BIG-IP DNS certification, which in turn will renew/extend the prerequisite F5-CA, BIG-IP; HOWEVER, taking and passing exam 301a does not result in a certification and, thus, does not renew/extend the F5-CA (it makes you eligible for 301b, which if passed then confers a certification and renews the prerequisites). Personally I find the 2-year renewal period a bit short, but I get why they do it. The technology changes so rapidly that in order to keep up, you should keep yourself up-to-date as well. Funny enough, when it comes to recertification, I have found that it takes much less time to prepare for them than I did for the original exams. This year I recertified my 402 and 202. For neither of them did I actually spend more than half a day on preparation – maybe a day at most. Remember, you don’t have to know the facts, you need to understand the scenarios and the rough F5 environment. As long as you keep getting exposed to F5 systems, recertification shouldn’t be too difficult. Alternatively, when it comes to recertification time, why not go for that higher-level one? Depending on which exam you have done, you can do a higher-level exam the next time around and it will automatically renew your previous exams (check the F5 exam policies for an exact overview of possibilities - https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K90101564 Again, as long as you are being exposed to F5 systems, you will probably find this easier than you might think! Where to next? If you ever thought about moving to a different place or country, these exams can also help for sure! Because of their international recognition, and a chronic shortage of good F5 engineers worldwide, there is always a job going somewhere that will interest you! Having lived in many different places myself, I can honestly say it’s the best way to expand your knowledge and understanding – brave the unknown! Get out of your comfort zone, pick up new things and try new ideas. If anything, use the certifications as a proof to yourself that you apparently DO know something. Even though we techies often don’t value ourselves that highly, clearly we have done well – so trying something new might not be such a bad thing after all. The trolls (ahem) of the exam development group have tried to make you fail, but in the face of danger, you laughed and came out victorious! Congrats and whatever you try next – go for it! Dr. Ken Says... I’d only add that, having been a practicing engineer who achieved a lot of certifications, I really wanted our program to be something people could be proud of. It is not easy and achieving it will likely require more work and effort than most of the any other certifications you may have. Most of the “complaints” I get basically all say the same thing, “it’s too difficult to get your certifications, why can’t you make it easy like everyone else?” To them I say, “why would you want something that anyone else can get?” Achieving an F5 certifications, especially the F5-CTS or F5-CSE certifications, is really an achievement. You should be proud of your accomplishments; I know we are.F5 Certifications Mega Meta Series: Enjoy your day out, and take an exam as well
In this series of articles, I will go into the details of how the exams are developed (...as far as I know at least), and how I think you can improve your chances of passing them. In this article, I will share time management tips - how to plan your exam and exam day. Guest Author: Alex Tijhuis An evangelist for anything software designed and security, and a self-described massive network geek, Alex is an F5 trainer and consultant at ABCT.net. While certified and highly skilled and interested in all things F5, he's just as happy pulling cables in a data center and designing scalable systems as he is messing around with the latest cool kids toys our fine industry has to offer. Part 2 - Time management tips - how to plan your exam and exam day When to book your exam The moment that you decide to go for an F5 exam is the moment that you should think about when you actually want to write your exam. Having a rough idea of when you want to do this, will give you the stimulus to prepare for it, no matter if this is in the next couple of weeks, or in the next couple of months. I’m not a fan of planning these things more than 6 months in advance though, as studying for it is then very likely to be pushed forward until it’s too late. Leaving the booking process for when you feel more confident, can - and often does - lead to indefinite postponing the actual exam. Have a look at the blueprint (more on blueprints in a later article), and once at least half of the topics on it make reasonable sense, would I definitely schedule the exam. You should probably think about doing it sometime in the next few weeks/couple of months then. If necessary, the exam centres allow you to postpone your exam free of charge, so there is no real reason not to book it. Okay, I wouldn’t recommend continuously postponing your exam either – that’s just postponing but with extra steps. I don’t know what the situation is like around the world, but around here, the exam centres are sometimes fully booked (often around December – nobody wants to do actual work, so everyone does exams…), and other times, there are loads of slots available. Anyone who’s first language isn’t English can get an extra 30 minutes for their exam, and if you book the exam in a non-English speaking country, this is automatically added to the exam time. I would highly recommend this if you can! Having extra time is the biggest cheat code you can get! If interested, send a mail to f5certification@f5.com for full details/caveats, and make sure you do this well in advance of your exam (at least a month). Lastly, F5 sometimes allows you to take multiple exams on the same day. Great if you can do it, but I wouldn't recommend it. If you have enough energy left after doing one exam to do another one, then clearly you have been waiting too long to go for the exam. A week before the exam date is a good time to quickly review how you are looking with your studies so far. When you have a look at the blueprint again, I expect you to recognise all the topics, and roughly know what they mean. Make a SHORT list of the topics that you might still be struggling with and leave those that you more or less understand – you don’t have the time to start all your studies from scratch now, so don’t do it. This should also be your last moment to postpone your exam if really necessary. Of course, something urgent can come up closer to the time that warrants a rescheduling, but don’t make a habit of rescheduling close to the actual date. Not only would you kick yourself if you have JUST missed the cut-off for free rescheduling, but it also doesn’t help your preparation. If you are really thinking about rescheduling a day or two before the date, then I don’t think you were ready to begin with – or you are just too hesitant. Hence; don’t reschedule unless you REALLY have to. The Grand Day On the day itself, don’t even think about trying to cram in those last details; it didn’t work at school/college/university and won’t do you any good now. Instead, grab a coffee and enjoy some sunshine! (Date/Location permitting) The boss has hopefully given you the day off for this, or you have taken a holiday for it, so you better enjoy it! Even if you don’t pass the exam, you at least got to enjoy the rest of it. I am well aware that taking/getting a day off is not a luxury that everyone can afford, but you have to wonder what is more expensive; cramming in an exam and failing, or taking a day off and passing? Don’t take too much stuff with you – often the lockers at exam centres are small and they aren’t too happy with you bringing big bags of stuff anyway. Don’t forget your two forms of ID though! They get grumpy if you don’t have them – for good reason – and it would be pretty annoying if you NOW find out that you’ve forgotten one. Why not put your stuff ready for the next day so you don’t have to think about what you need to bring with you? Hey, even these little things – however pedantic they sound - already make a difference in having a good night’s sleep beforehand, which in turn makes you better prepared for it, so why not do it? I always like going for an exam early in the afternoon; 12.30-ish, after rush hour in the morning, and with a bit of luck I can be back at home before the evening rush. I hate being stuck in traffic, or worse, finding out that a train got cancelled and the PA-system helpfully announces that they don’t know when the next train goes. Which conveniently brings to the next point; make sure you arrive at the exam centre well on time. Most exam centres I've been to are happy for you to start early. That is, if they have capacity, so no guarantee. Worst comes to worst; you have an hour to kill around the exam centre. There is sure to be a sandwich shop or other eatery around that you can drop in for some lunch. Having this time beforehand also means you have a few minutes to relax which will really come in handy later on. Since you have to switch off and store your phone at the exam centre anyway, why not switch it off an hour earlier? This means that you don’t get any last-minute distractions. If it was that urgent, they would have messaged you earlier. During the exam, there will definitely be times that you simply cannot read ANYTHING that’s on the screen. This is normal and happens to everyone. When that happens, lean back. Close your eyes, cross your arms (just so you don’t trick yourself in continuing anyway) and take a few deep breaths. Let this take 30 seconds. “Yeah, but, I don’t have that much time left!!” Don’t care… If you don’t take a moment to take this break, this block will only get worse. Seriously, take this 30 seconds, make it a minute if you have to, and then get back to it. Depending on the difficulty of the exam and my own state that day, I end up doing this at least 2 to 4 times during an exam. For me, it really helps! Another trick that helps me, is to keep track of how many questions I have left, versus how much time there is left. Say, I have 85 questions in 90 minutes, that basically comes down to a question a minute - which sounds very short! Every now and then I glance at the time and quickly calculate if I still have roughly a minute per question left. If yes, I’m on schedule and no reason to stress, if no, I’m probably better off skipping some larger questions and focus on the simpler ones. Preferably, don't plan anything too important after your exam either. I've noticed that I tend to get distracted if I'm thinking ahead of where I need to be after the exam – that's all effort NOT being used on the exam itself. If possible, see if you can quickly drop by in that pub just outside the exam centre afterwards to decompress. To be honest, it wouldn't be the first time that I'm blankly staring at a glass for an hour after an exam. no matter how many I've done, I'm still completely toast afterwards. Let’s just hope that was worth it and you passed!
