Review of my first Router Configuration & Subnetting Practical Exam at university under timed conditions.

So I just finished the first practical exam for my networking unit I’m taking at university and just thought I'd share my thoughts below. I'm sharing this out of interest for others but also to maybe gain feedback from the thoughts of experienced people currently working in network management, those who are up for a general discussion or anyone else interested.

So pretty much the exam started with us being given a sample company's network address block and having to design subnets to fit their specific needs using VLSM. This part was pretty easy.

We then had to assign each computer in our work station an IP address from the original block that had been allocated to the company, and then undertake basic configuration from within a hyper-terminal (just assigning the router and IP address & subnet mask from what we came up with in the subnetting component). After this we had to start a telnet session and connect to it from the second computer. This is the part I didn't do because I ran out of time after having spent a fair chunk of time drawing out the address blocks ect. from the subnetting question earlier in the paper.

I did however get a few extra marks for having enabled telnet to be used on the first PC, but didn't get the last 2 questions (which was to connect one PC to the other using telnet from the client PC) because I didn't have time to disconnect the serial adapter from the first PC and change it back to having a straight through ethernet cable to the switch and then another cable from the switch to the router.

Essentially I'm pretty sure I had a fair idea of what I was required to do during the practical exam, in terms of router configuration and subnetting, which I completed both successfully, but in the end I ran out of time do start a telnet session and connect to it from the other computer because I'm still only new to data networking and haven't had much experience within this area.

What are the thoughts of industry professionals in networking management or related fields about my experience? Looking back it seems fairly straight forward what I should have done during the exam, but in hindsight I guess everything always looks different. Should this be easy at my level or does it take awhile to learn? I've heard that industry certifications are undertaken in a timed format as well hence why the university is attempting to prep us under simulated conditions similar to what it would be like in the real-world.

Any discussions/feedback welcome :)

TL;DR I knew all the content but under timed conditions everything has to be done a lot more quickly and efficiently than in practice, hence I didn’t get finish the last 2 questions (10 total questions).