Always a good question... Let's just keep things a little in perspective though. The Assessor Labs' grading is NOT done by the same people at Cisco. It's a sub-contract job. So while decent, it's not perfect.
The REAL grading is being reviewed by many CCIE's as well. And we should all know how opinionated they are. :) So some things are black/white by virtue of rules allowing only one solution. Others are results-based, and are going to be very specific. Now, that being said, EXPECT, GREP and any other tool I can think of (unix-based) to develop the grading IS indeed case-sensitive. Now, can they put something in like "[Rr][Ii][Pp][Vv]6"? Sure. Do they? Who knows. It never hurts to ask the proctor about case sensitive, but on the flip side, if they go out of their way to put it a certain way on the test (particularly if it's "show" output) then I'd expect it to be that way. But things should be RESULTS based on the real lab exam. In developing our own grading, we have been through this debate a lot as well, and have tried (hopefully not missed anyway, but alyway a possibility!) to make things as agnostic as possible and about the results (via a show, debug, ping, trace, etc.). HTH, Scott Morris, CCIE4 (R&S/ISP-Dial/Security/Service Provider) #4713, JNCIE-M #153, JNCIS-ER, CISSP, et al. CCSI/JNCI-M/JNCI-ER VP - Technical Training - IPexpert, Inc. IPexpert Sr. Technical Instructor [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telephone: +1.810.326.1444 Fax: +1.810.454.0130 http://www.ipexpert.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Tony Hidalgo Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 10:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [OSL | CCIE_RS] Question about CCIE Lab Grading Method Hello all. I have a question regarding how the actual CCIE Lab exam is evaluated. I understand that it uses an aplication or software that looks for the "expected" outcome or solution and when is not clear, a person checks the answer and determines if it's right or wrong. I took the two versions of the Cisco Assesment Labs of R&S and was surprised with the results. This because even when the final solution was what they asked for, the questions were incorrect according to their "AutoVerify" grading engine. I have two examples: 1-On BGP, I had 3 routers and one of them had to be a route-reflector, the other two its clients. I set a peer group, configured it correctly and added the two other routers under it. The questions did not prohibit the use of peer groups but still, the question was marked incorrect. When I checked their answer, they just did not use a peer group but the rest of the config and the expected outcome was identical. 2-On IPV6, they asked to set a RIP process called RIPv6. I configured a process called "RIPV6" (note that the "v" on my process was Upper Case), and the question was marked incorrect just because of that. The results that I got were exactly what they asked for. So, I am kind of worried that the real CCIE LAB exam uses the same grading method or something similar that even checks for Upper/Lower case and marks a question wrong if there is the minimum difference. Has anybody taken the Cisco CCIE Lab Assesments tests? What do you guys think about it? Is it the real deal? Thanks
