First part
----------
As said the first part is the theory exam. Living in belgium I had the choice between taking the french or the english version. I took the french one because I followed the courses in french. But I think that I will switch to the english one because a) the english CCNA 1 exams had 4 question less than the french one and b) IIRC the final exams (after CCNA 4) is held in english even if you did everything else in french.
So, I had 53 questions to answer. The order in which the questions are displayed is different for every student so don't bother to look onto the screen of another student, his question n?15 will be another one than yours.
The question topics, as expected, cover almost all modules of CCNA 1. I can't really remember a question related to module 1 but that's one of the easiest ones. You'll have to do some subnetting questions, cable stuff (lengths/speed/problems), problem analysis (why can't machine A access the network), connection stuff (which port to use, what cable to use when connecting to a console port, which cable to use when connecting a switch to a host, ...) and so on.
The end result was that of the 13/14 people who did the test, only 3 or 4 were above 90%. Most people were in the 80% and 2 or 3 below.
Personally, I had 95,6% which puts me to the top 3 (the best had 98% havind held his exams in english so he had 4 questions less than me... I consider being my wrong answered questions in those 4 so I'm better than him... nah...)
Second part
-----------
The second part is the practical exam. Here you have 5 parts.
1. You have to produce a network cable for yourself. You have to answer which type of cable you use and which norm you use for the connectors.
I had to produce a cross-over cable thus using an UTP cat5/5e cable with connectors using the T568-A and T568-B norms. Other people had to produce a straight cable.
Once we had produced the cable, we had to show it to the instructor who noted the finishing.
2. You get an IP adress and a subnet mask. You have to determine to which class the IP belongs. You have to make statements about the netid/broadcastid etc of that network.
3. You have to calculate to which subnet of the network the IP of part 2 belongs. You have to calculate how many hosts/subnets are possible in the network. You have to transform the IP/Subnet mask into binary form.
4. You have to write down the configuration of 2 PC so that those two PCs can operate in the same subnet.
After you have shown the 4 parts to your instructor, you pass to the 5th part:
You have to configure two PCs accordingly to the configuration you wrote down using the network cable you produced yourself. You then have to make sure the connection is ok by pinging the machines betweens themself (machina A pings B and B pings A) and you have to show it to your instructor.
Comments: I have finished the second part successfully. Unfortunately, due to the fact that I misunderstood the french description of the base class par (part 2 in second part of exams) I did something stupid. I redid the stuff and got 1/2 of the points for that part. All the rest got the mention excellent. I did not get the final points for the practical exams... The instructor just said "It will be a surprise..."
Another comment: Some students forgot to configure the default gateway (which is not really necessary when just connecting 2 Pcs with a cross-over cable). They got less points for that...
After all, 95,6% in theory exams and 90% in practical exams (5 parts; 1 part 1/2 points) is ok with me... even if I'm not first of my class...
Have fun.
