Cisco has announced some changes to the CCIE exam. Especially to the CCIE lab exam for Routing and Switching. Other paths should follow. There will be an oral test within the 8 hours lab exam, about topics from the blueprint. Four to five questions will be asked by the proctor, to be answered by the candidate in about 10 – 15 minutes.
Answers will be counted into the overall score of the lab exam.
It seems Cisco want to find out those who just memorize solutions and can not tell anything about those topics, which are being currently configured. Everything is fair game and it’s a challenge and shouldn’t be to difficult if you have learned your lesson.
Here is the part of the text from the Cisco Announcement:
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Effective February 1, 2009, Cisco will introduce a new type of question format to CCIE Routing and Switching lab exams. In addition to the live configuration scenarios, candidates will be asked a series of four or five open-ended questions, drawn from a pool of questions based on the material covered on the lab blueprint. No new topics are being added.
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Source:
http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/ccie/index.html