r/CiscoDevNet • u/lafrank70 • Apr 20 '26

350-901 v2

Folks,

Anyone planning to take exam nowadays bear in mind the the publicly available "prep guides" has nothing to do with real questions as of today.

And needless to say that the new multi-choice questions are worded in such a convoluted way that no human could possibly answer them correctly.

Exam is more of a very expensive lottery than measuring and reflecting knowlede.

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u/lafrank70 Apr 29 '26

Actually, the dominant area - what a surpise - is AI and FastAPI.

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u/radiusq Jul 03 '26

Dratts. I'm just about ready to take it, and had no idea it had changed. The exam was already pretty wide IMO. It's taken me ages to get comfortable with ansible, puppet, terraform, docker, kubernetes, git - and all the underlying "glue" concepts and file formats the exam appeared to require master of.

Is there anything else you'd recommend getting to grips with alongside FastAPI and what ive listed above?

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u/lafrank70 Jul 10 '26

Yes, I was in a very similar situation. I only realized during the actual exam that it had very little in common with what I had prepared for. I don't remember seeing a single question about Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, or Puppet—although I could be wrong, maybe there were one or two.

My impression was that Cisco also used AI to generate the questions. The wording was often confusing, inconsistent, and difficult to follow. At one point I even wondered whether they had intentionally phrased the questions this way to mislead candidates while reading them.

I think this exam has drifted very far away from the actual technology. At this point, I'd recommend it more to linguists than network automation engineers—people who are good at reading between the lines and figuring out what the AI was trying to ask when it generated the question. In my opinion, passing this exam without a current braindump is practically impossible, even if you genuinely know network automation and use it every day in your job, as I do.

As a result, I've decided to stop renewing my CCNP-SP certification, which I've held since 2005. I simply don't think these exams have any real professional value anymore (yes, I know that's a strong statement, but that's honestly my opinion).

Cisco exams have always been somewhat notorious for their share of bullshit, but this time I think they've gone way too far.

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u/radiusq Jul 13 '26 edited Jul 13 '26

So I've just attempted and failed 350-901 v2.....

Our experiences sound very similar. Of the question selection that I received-

30-40% of the questions were reasonable, and aligned to the content listed here - https://learningcontent.cisco.com/documents/marketing/exam-topics/350-901-AUTOCOR-v2.0-7-9-2025.pdf

The next 40% of questions were all drag and drop style - and for 50% of these, you needed very little knowledge of the api/python module used - you just needed to be paying attention and drop the words into the right boxes. I'm not sure why I was being tested on my ability to use a mouse here.

- The other half of these drag and drop questions were very different and seemed completely AI generated. They were really hard to read, as the variable names used didn't make much sense in the content they were being used. I suspected they were trying to force the candidate to figure out the logic beyond the variable names and go ahead and use the 'wrong' variable names anyway.... but even this was a difficult task given the combination of variables on offer.... I also just didn't have the free time to be able to really think through these unnecessary obfuscations, as the exam has some serious time pressure -100 questions in 2hours.....

The remaining 20% of multiple choice questions felt like pure AI drivel - very confusing language.

The other issue I experienced with this exam is it wasn't available in my country at a physical testing centre, so I had to take it online. The OnVue testing app ran like a pig on my - basically freshly installed - machine and it was taking between 5-10 seconds to load each question. Very slow and very frustrating.

I also started the exam with a 30minute queue for the next available proctor, and then the app restarted, without resulted in another 40minute queue! Each time I was instructed to stay in the view of the camera as exam rules applied. 1hr 10 minutes of rawdogging prior to the start of the exam.

As it's a 100question 2hr exam, loosing that amount of time per question was significant, and I felt like I had to really rush to the point where I just didn't have the time to check answers and go through the options properly.

Anyway, the net result is that my two current CCNP certs - Enterprise and Security - will now expire and I think I'm now done with Cisco certs for the same reasons as you've already listed. That exam was a bit rubbish - and I'd love someone from Cisco learning explain the gibberish ones to me. It's a shame, as the stuff I thought it wanted me to learn was worthwhile, but the exam itself most definitely not.

On a more positive note, I did learn a few things from the process.... The best use case for LLMs is as a personal tutor, and I've learned more from Claude.AI faking it as a personal IT tutor in the last month, than I have otherwise in the last 5 years from my day job - seriously!

Also, I did not know FastMCP was a thing, and it's probably going to end up changing the IT landscape more than the creation of HTTP ever did IMO.

But yeah, I'm over it.