Voice CCIE Ask the Expert Question on Lab Timing

Question:
Some people say that if you want to pass the lab exam you must be able to finish everything within six to seven hours and set the rest of the time for troubleshooting. What are your thoughts on this one please?

Answer:
It really depends – I have seen candidates who finished everything shortly after lunch and still not passing, yet some people have passed without finishing the entire exam.

I could not stress verification enough, as many candidate unfortunately fail the lab because they did not recover from configuration mistakes (sometimes as simple as a typo on ip address). With no partial credits, these mistakes can add-up to your disadvantage rather quickly.

So, verification (configuration validation, troubleshooting, and recovery) is as important as configuration, and my advise to candidates is that you should devote equal, if not more, amount of your preparation time on how to verify than on how to configure.

With that being said, let me be the first to admit that the Voice lab is configuration-heavy – by this I meant that candidates must dedicate a substantial amount of time merely typing in the required configurations. With the current lab content structure, I advise candidates to practice on a configuration scheme to save time by minimizing the frequency of “touching” any configuration page: think updating each IP phone configuration page only once or twice instead of doing it every time after you update a field on the page.

This leads to another excellent discussion point: in a test to assess candidates’ technical knowledge, candidates should not be “burdened” to come up with a configuration scheme to speed things up. In other words, candidates’ typing speed, to say the least, should not matter too much in them passing or failing.

So, this is for all who’s intersted, what is your thoughts on being given a lab test with certain basic parameters, such as IP phones, device pools, etc., preconfigured?

Your thoughts on this one please? And just a reminder that “it depends” is reserved for the moderator and myself on this session. 🙂
Just kidding, all responses are appreciated and if you could provide some thoughts behind your opinion it would be even better.