Being humiliated by a computer may be a common experience for some people, but it's pretty rare for me. Today, though, I had to take an online "skill & knowledge assessment" test of my network engineering abilities.

Now, I will grant, written tests of practical, hands-on skills are usually unable to fully capture the essence of the skill being tested. But to make up for that, the test writers seem to have gone off the deep end as far as the difficulty level goes. I haven't sweated so much over a test since I took the CCIE lab test back in '98.

I blew some really easy questions:

The access list command access-list 100 deny ip 172.16.0.0 0.0.255.255 192.168.0.0 0.0.255.255 blocks traffic from which source addresses?

and scored on some of the more difficult ones:

What is the default metric of an EIGRP route redistributed into OSPF without a defined metric?

OK, that wasn't really difficult, but I'm pretty rusty on my Routing Protocols kung-fu — I had to guess. I wish they'd asked me at least one question about ISDN or T1s or 802.11b.

After it was done, the online proctor told me I did OK, but I still feel like an idiot.

Posted by Russ at 12:28 PM, December 21, 2004 in Geekery