Seriously? I haven't done any labs in Security+ in almost 10 years, much less a cyber range. I tell the students the labs are there if they want to do them. They can reinforce the lecture. But they're certainly not required to pass the exams because CompTIA exams do not test for any specific tools.
Disclaimer, I am a grouchy old bastard.
DoD Bases are all over the place, but having taught at many there is always someone responsible that you can push to make labs work.
An airbase in Alabama had put us in a room with no service. The students had been provided with LTE dongles, but there was no signal. I had the responsible person find us a room in a building that had signal because labs/practice work.
I got fired by a training company that hired me to teach CEH, but when I sat a class taught by one of their trainers this person demoed nothing. I got to be a fly on the wall at break time and listened to students talking about how they had never even seen Linux let alone used it. CEH has almost 2000 slides in 5 days, but that is not an excuse to demo nothing. When I told the Training manager about the student comments, I didn't get invited back.
All of us trainer types have some background, some of our students have none. Although some students will be able to memorize what they need to pass the exam, others will benefit greatly from the practical experience of practice.
Teaching CCNA in St Louis our training manager had built a hands on 2 day lab, complete from VLSM to Access lists. The pass rate for CCNA increased by over 50% for students that completed the lab.
Greg, I'll bet you are like me. With 20years experience (real life, not labs) I passed the original beta Security+ with no objectives. The fact that I had several CNEs a couple MCSEs A= and Net+ and 20 years on the job made it easy even if it was a little grueling, 300 questions if I remember correctly.
I am a huge fan of experience, and always tell students to do the labs unless they already do it at work.
Sorry for the tirade.
