SCOR 350-701 Passed
Passed the SCOR exam last week and my head is still spinning. Took a bit to gather my thoughts. It was my 3rd attempt (Was definitely prepared by my 2nd but more on that later). I started studying in September of last year, with some months of intense study and some with none at all. Ramped up significantly the last month or so as I was really motivated to finally get it done. Some thoughts:
Exam
Can be very unfair if you get a bad test bank. My 1st attempt i thought the questions were straightforward enough by Cisco standards, so on my 2nd attempt I knew I was ready based on the questions I got from the 1st attempt but still failed.
The bank I got the 2nd time was outrageous. Filled with questions that straight up weren’t in the exam topics or covered in any material. Many questions with 2 right answers, no right answers but you had to choose the most correct, and questions worded in a way that felt intentionally tricky. Like they weren’t trying to test understanding of the topics, but rather trying to mislead you into choosing wrong. Felt very discouraged after this attempt. Despite this, i scored slightly higher than my first attempt even though my understanding of the topics was *significantly* better.
I passed my 3rd attempt less than a week later with only 1 additional day study which demonstrates how your test bank can influence the outcome.
Resources I used
Cisco e-learning 6/10
Covered everything in the exam topics. Some in enough depth, some not enough. Thought it was very good as a primer of everything you may see, but it did fool me into thinking i was ready for my 1st attempt when i very much was not.
Not bad at all if it’s paid for on your behalf but i’ll never buy Cisco e-learning out of pocket again. Price compared to INE is simply not worth it at all.
INE 9/10
I HATED watching videos. Very much a book guy but when I locked in they were fantastic. Can’t say enough how good they are. I bought it once before right after my CCNA to study for ENCOR, but never took advantage of it and let it expire without really studying for ENCOR at all. Got it again for SCOR when I realized i needed another resource.
It has everything you need and in enough depth for the exam. What I did rather than go through the SCOR learning path is go to each specialty path, (SVPN, SISE, SNCF etc), so that I could get certain topics explained deeper than what the SCOR would require. My thought process was I refuse to lab EOL products like the Ironports so I need to understand the real life relevant topics to a point where I get NO questions wrong for them on SCOR to make up for the useless topics I refuse to get deep on.
Boson exsim 7.5/10
Very good to test your understanding of the exam topics. Almost to a fault. Like I said previously, the exam felt purposely misleading and Boson is not. It’ll tell you if you know the topics but not if you’re ready to pass the exam. Not their fault but it is what it is. Would recommend.
Labs 10/10
I labbed everything on the exam that I felt was most relevant irl. ISE, RA VPN, site-to-site VPN, FTD. None of the cloud stuff, endpoint or ESA/WSA. This was crucial to my understanding of each topic. Unless you have extensive real life experience with several topics, you need to lab to pass period.
I often see people ask if the exam has labs. It doesn’t. But that’s not a good thing. Imo, i feel people ask this because they believe multiple choice makes an exam easier than PBQ/labs. It doesn’t. A good engineer knows that to support a network irl you need to deploy configure and troubleshoot platforms, which i learned how to do while studying.
If the exam had labs and less misleading questions, i’d have passed my 2nd attempt and saved myself 400 bucks.
Conclusion
I learned so much from this journey and it feels good to be done. Not happy about the money I spent but I genuinely feel like the process made me a significantly better engineer.
Please feel free to ask any questions. I gained so much information from this sub that helped me pass so I want to do what I can to give back.