Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’ve just begun studying for my CCNP certification, and within the first two chapters I’ve already found a practice exam question that’s indecipherable to humans (although not necessarily to Cisco employees):

The “correct” answer is B: b, c, d. As far as I’ve ever been aware, the OSI model has seven layers that are numerically labeled. The “correct” answer obviously does not refer to the numerical OSI layers. There is no Layer A, Layer B, and so forth, and even if there were, the question would be misleading because it would not specify that a, b, c, etc. are layers instead of other test answers.

Perhaps the answer refers to the other selections of the multiple choice question. But wait, that can’t be the case either, because here it’s a self-referencing answer, and then it’s an answer that references another answer which references four other answers, including itself and the original redundant answer, but actually names two valid OSI layers (Layers 3 and 4), both of which are correct, but not the complete answer.

What. The. Fuck. Does anyone proofread this stuff before it’s sold?

The correct answer to the question is Layer 2, Layer 3, and Layer 4. That is not a possibility because each answer for the question in the test is a radio button, so only one can be selected. And neither B nor C includes all three of those.