Cisco CCNA (200-301) study guide

How to use this guide

Know these cold:

• The OSI and TCP/IP models used as a troubleshooting tool, not trivia
• IPv4 addressing and subnetting, including VLSM — practised until it is fast
• IPv6 addressing, address types and basic configuration
• Cabling, interfaces, and interpreting interface state from show output

Know these cold:

• VLANs, access and trunk ports, and inter-VLAN routing
• Spanning Tree Protocol — root election, port roles, and PortFast/BPDU Guard
• EtherChannel with LACP and PAgP
• Wireless fundamentals: WLC architecture, AP modes, and SSID configuration

Know these cold:

• Reading the routing table and predicting path selection
• Administrative distance and metrics when several sources offer a route
• OSPFv2 single-area: neighbour states, DR/BDR election, and common adjacency failures
• Static routing, default routes, and first-hop redundancy with HSRP

Know these cold:

• NAT and PAT configuration and troubleshooting
• DHCP server, client and relay behaviour
• NTP, DNS and syslog in an operational context
• QoS concepts and per-hop behaviour at a conceptual level

Know these cold:

• Access control lists — placement, direction, and implicit deny
• Layer 2 protections: port security, DHCP snooping, dynamic ARP inspection
• AAA concepts, and device-access hardening with SSH
• Wireless security — WPA2/WPA3 and authentication methods

Know these cold:

• Why automation exists: configuration drift, scale, and repeatability
• REST APIs, and reading JSON returned by a network device
• Controller-based networking and Cisco DNA Center concepts
• Configuration-management tools — Ansible, Puppet, Chef — at a comparison level

Common mistakes

• ✕Leaving subnetting until late. It underpins addressing, routing and ACL questions, and it is the one skill where being slow costs you time everywhere else.
• ✕Memorising commands without the resulting state. The exam shows you output and asks what it means, which is the opposite direction.
• ✕Ignoring the implicit deny at the end of every ACL, then getting the traffic-flow questions backwards.
• ✕Treating Automation and Programmability as skippable. It is 10% — the same as IP Services — and it is the domain candidates most often leave unstudied.
• ✕Confusing administrative distance with metric. AD chooses between routing sources; the metric chooses within one.
• ✕Skimming wireless because it feels peripheral. It sits inside Network Access, which is 20% of the exam.

Exam-day tips

• ✓You cannot go back. Cisco exams do not allow returning to a previous question, so commit before you move on — flag-and-return is not available to you here.
• ✓Budget for the long questions early. At 120 minutes with an unpublished item count, pace by the clock rather than by question number.
• ✓For configuration questions, read the existing config before the question stem — the answer is usually a conflict already present in it.
• ✓Eliminate on the hard constraint first: an option that breaks a stated requirement is removable without evaluating the rest.
• ✓Draw the topology. Two minutes sketching interfaces and subnets prevents most routing mistakes.
• ✓Answer everything — there is no penalty for a wrong answer.

How to know you’re ready

One good practice score can be luck. The signal that holds up: consistently at or above the real pass mark (Not published — Cisco does not release cut scores) across multiple full-length sets, with no single domain dragging far below the rest. Kwizza tracks your per-domain readiness automatically as you practice.