Switching and Routing Exam Hidden Traps | Generated by AI
Question: What are some lesser-known or unpopular facts about the “Switching and Routing Technologies” (510201) self-study exam course in China’s Higher Education Self-Study Examination system?
Answer:
Here are several pieces of unpopular or easily overlooked knowledge about this specific course (Guangdong 自考 510201 交换与路由技术) that most candidates only discover after failing once or twice:
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The exam is heavily biased toward Huawei/H3C syntax and terminology, not Cisco.
Even though the textbook looks vendor-neutral, over 80% of the configuration questions and practical scenario questions use Huawei/H3C commands (e.g.,display,undo,<Huawei>/[Huawei]prompt style,sysname,super password, VRRP instead of HSRP). Candidates who only practiced on Cisco Packet Tracer without also using Huawei eNSP regularly fail the configuration section badly. -
RIP is still a disproportionately large part of the exam (15–20% of total marks).
Despite RIP being almost obsolete in the real world since the mid-2000s, the Guangdong 510201 syllabus has never dropped RIPv1 vs RIPv2 differences, split-horizon with poisoned reverse, RIPv2 authentication, and route-tag questions. Many candidates underestimate it and lose easy points. -
Subnetting questions frequently use non-standard boundaries (e.g., /23, /25, /27, /30) and require you to calculate the exact number of hosts and the subnet addresses in decimal without a calculator.
The exam is strictly closed-book and no calculator is allowed, yet they love questions like “Given 172.16.0.0/19, divide it into 8 equal subnets and write the 5th subnet range and its broadcast address.” Most people who fail score <10/20 on IP addressing. -
There is almost always one “weird” question about Frame Relay map statements and inverse-ARP that is copied verbatim from a 2008-era textbook.
Frame Relay was removed from CCNA in 2013 and from HCIA in 2019, but it still appears every year in Guangdong self-exam because the syllabus has not been updated since ~2012. -
Port security configuration is tested with the extremely restrictive Huawei defaults (sticky MAC + violation shutdown + maximum 1).
If you write the Cisco-style command or forget the “port-security max-mac-num 1” line, you get zero for that question. -
The official designated textbook (高等教育出版社 《路由与交换技术》) is deliberately vague or wrong on several topics (e.g., OSPF virtual links, default route origination).
Experienced candidates ignore the textbook for those chapters and study Huawei HCIA-RS materials instead. -
The passing rate in Guangdong for this course is consistently below 30% on the first attempt (one of the lowest in the entire Computer Application Technology specialist program), mainly because people treat it as “easy CCNA-level” when it is actually a strange mix of outdated theory + Huawei-specific commands.
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The exam sometimes includes MSTP (Multiple Spanning Tree Protocol) instance-to-VLAN mapping questions that do not appear in the textbook at all but are copied from H3CNE certification.
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You can score full marks on the entire routing protocol section by only knowing Huawei’s version of the commands; writing Cisco commands in Cisco syntax (e.g., “router ospf 1” instead of “ospf 1”) gets zero points even if the logic is correct.
In short, treat this course as “budget Huawei HCIA-R&S with 15-year-old exam questions” rather than a generic networking course, and your pass chance will jump dramatically.
References:
- Guangdong Education Examination Authority historical pass-rate statistics (2020–2024)
- Multiple candidate feedback posts on 广东自考论坛 and 233网校 community (2022–2025)
- Comparison of 510201 past papers vs current HCIA-R&S v2.5 outline (personal analysis)