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So I spoke with a R&S CCIE that took his Lab prior to the troubleshooting being a separate piece of the exam.  He told me that the OEQ section accounted for 21 points towards the total.  This also means that getting the best possible score on the OEQ could lead to you having more points towards the lab.  Basically giving you more margin for error.

Additionally he stated that it is best on the OEQ questions to "elaborate till you are blue in the face" basically without making stuff up explain as much as you can about your answer.  There is some understanding that you can not give a verbatim answer, but you should be able to expand upon your pontification of how you understand the technology.  The goal of the OEQs is obviously to thwart people from brain dumping configs and having no theory, so the more you expand on a subject the more you prove you know that subject.

He also gave a theoretical theory about answering the questions:

Say you have a buddy who knows the material better than but answers the questions with short and vague answers.  That buddy may have had the exact same questions as you that day, but he got a zero and you got a 100.

Another thing that we all know that he brought up is that the question pool is huge to make sure you can't brute force the OEQs so no matter what you find trudging the torrents and the file shares you will probably just find old answers.  Besides you'll probably pick up a virus and be cheating yourself.  

While OEQs seem like an additional stressful aspect of the lab, I would say it could actually be a benefit to the journey and also possibly allow you to miss an additional 3 point section on the lab.

His example was that he didn't even do a couple of the security sections because he knew that he nailed the OEQs and didn't want to jack up any of the configs that he knew he had done correctly.

Additional comments he had where take the whole 30 minutes to really do everything you can to answer the OEQs and best as possible and that when you clicked on finish that's it, no going back no more.  Also as we already know there is no access to documentation of any kind during the OEQ portion of the test.

This is RS and not SP (obviously the first test with OEQs is January 4th).  I am interested in hearing feedback from people that take the exam on if they felt the questions where really in the scope of the exam blue print and if they concentrated on major subjects (MPLS, BGP, IGP, etc.).  

weaverap:

Additionally he stated that it is best on the OEQ questions to "elaborate till you are blue in the face" basically without making stuff up explain as much as you can about your answer.  There is some understanding that you can not give a verbatim answer, but you should be able to expand upon your pontification of how you understand the technology.  The goal of the OEQs is obviously to thwart people from brain dumping configs and having no theory, so the more you expand on a subject the more you prove you know that subject.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.  If you don't know the answer exactly, elaborate as much as you can to show them you understand the technology.  I have no intention of giving short answers - unless it is a simple answer, of course.  When I heard about these OEQs, I thought to myself I wish they would do this in a board type setting where you were asked general questions by the proctors in a board room type setting.  That way you can talk to them and they can understand that you know the technology.  Time being a constraint, I feel this is their attempt to let you explain yourself and your understanding of the technology.  I'd much rather essay questions than multiple choice any day of the week.  What is important is that you understand, not know an answer just based on the question.

About the OEQs being part of the lab exam score, I did not think that was the case, but maybe I am wrong.

My SP test is on Jan 11.  I will let everyone know how good/bad the OEQs were - without breaking NDA, of course.  I will tell you (as I've said in an another thread), my last month of studying that I'm currently in now is completely hands off - no lab time.  I'm just re-reading books to get back into the theory I lost with my head in the lab.  I'm about completely done with the "MPLS Configuration on Cisco IOS Software" - what a good book.  There are some errors that you have to watch out far - especially in the diagrams on occasion, but you can find those pretty easily.  I'm also re-reading chapters in Doyle's "Routing TCP/IP" books:  ISIS, OSPF, Multicast.  I already know where everything is on Cisco's documentation site, but I may just go make sure before the exam.  The last thing to do is just look over the system management stuff on Cisco's documentation site one more time: NTP, SNMP, RMON, Syslog, and Netflow.

Hey

All of this makes me feel a little more comfortable about what is to come. I did think that 30minutes was a LONG time for four 'couple of word' answers. I can elaborate and pad out answers with relevant info to my hearts content (I hope). I am mostly worried about being caught out on a minor fact that I have not memorized but if I can talk around a subject then hopefully that can't happen.

Does anybody know about the timing? For example, does the 30minute chunk come out of the eight hour total, and if so, if you finish your OEQ early then you do not compromise your lab time as much. If that's the case then whilst you guys are still right about taking your time & elaborating, you do not want to find yourself short on the lab because you were twiddling your thumbs, adjusting your grammar on the OEQ.

My lab is on the 4th, I guess that makes me guinea pig number one. I'll relay some info afterwards.

If you write a novel - the proctors have made it clear they will not even bother to read it. I coach students to answer Core Knowledge questions using a one word to three to four sentence response. That is all it should ever take. Cisco indicates that the most typical response required is one of four to five words. 

You are given 30 minutes to complete the Core Knowledge section - you should only need about 10 to 15 minutes, so you will indeed gain some time for the Configuration portion. 

Resist the temptation to rush on them, however. Fail the section (miss two or more of four questions) and you fail the entire lab. 

Anthony Sequeira:

If you write a novel - the proctors have made it clear they will not even bother to read it. I coach students to answer Core Knowledge questions using a one word to three to four sentence response. That is all it should ever take. Cisco indicates that the most typical response required is one of four to five words. 

Okay, mixed messages here, I guess you should know what you're talking about Anthony :-)

The prospect of failing the whole lab because I can't remember an obscure fact about ISIS PRC (or something) is a little scary, however if they look at the answers as a whole and do not fail on one missing/incorrect then I'm not worried.

The point is that they are open ended questions so you can do just that - explain yourself a little.  If they wanted exclusively short answers, it could have been done as a multiple choice test.  I don't suggest writing an essay, but if it is warranted, a paragraph wouldn't hurt.  Some answers are probably just fine with a short answer.

If they ask me command syntax, I may not get it 100% right if it is some off the wall command.  I would do my best and explain on the question that I normally 'question mark/tab' my way through uncommon commands.  That is exactly what I do.  Whether or not that would be an acceptable answer or not is not known, but it is better than just guessing.

I don't think Cisco is trying to screw us over or anything. 

I wonder about getting the correct syntax as well. For example, mixing up "ip pim autorp listener" and "ip pim auto-rp listener"; one of them is wrong, but the one answering may have gotten the right idea (let's just assume the answer is "ip pim autorp listener"). I wonder how will the verdict be...

@awilkins - yes - you are absolutely correct - Cisco is not trying to screw anyone with these questions - spelling and grammar do not count - for example. :-) I also like what you point out here regarding flexibility in answering the question. An example I like to give in R&S is about NAT. Say you get a diagram that is asking you to pinpoint an answer of inside local; inside global; outside local; or outside global. Now, let us say that from the diagram it is tough to tell exactly which one they are trying to highlight. Perhaps there is even an error in the diagram! (This has happened!). You can easily get credit for the question by giving a brief sentence on each NAT component. Your answer ends up being four sentences long and you just proved you knew your stuff and pass the question. You could even add a 5th sentence that indicates the diagram is overly vague (say it in a nice way!)

It is worth stating one more time, however, that the average Core Knowledge response requires 4 to 5 words (per Cisco!).

@mbahar - yes - you could be slightly off in your syntax for a command and they are not going to fail you on that. Thank goodness this section is human graded and not computer graded. 

Anthony Sequeira:

Be careful on one point - if your answer is overly long - the proctor will not even read it.

Find that very hard to believe. If they did not want to read a four sentence paragraph they could limit the number of characters to 30 or something equally ridiculous.

My info came from someone that scored 100 percent on the R&S open ended questions.  I am sure that he meant within reason, if you don't have a textbook response you can hopefully still display that you understand the technology and the question by explaining your answer with 2-3 sentences instead of a two word guess at the answer.

I trust your judgement since you are getting feedback from students and Cisco and I got feedback from one guy.

Can you confirm that 21 points come from the Questions and are part of 100 point total?

A four sentence paragraph is not overly long.

What the Cisco representative that I spoke with was talking about was something like a 300 word article.

And you are correct - I doubt they even allow that to fit within the answer field anymore. 

@Weaverap

If they score this like the R&S was scored...and I have not confirmation yet on this....

Yes - it will be 21 points for Core Knowledge out of 100 points total. 

This assures you fail with a 79 if you fail Core Knowledge

I have a simple question:

if I finsih OEQ say in 10 minutes... do i get 7 hours and 50 minutes for configuration section or it is fixed at 7 hrs and 30 minutes?

7h50mins