Certification News

Cisco will no longer be using Prometric for test delivery.

As of Aug. 1, Cisco will no longer be using Prometric for test delivery. Instead, the company has chosen Pearson Vue to be its primary test vendor as, according to Cisco's site, "shifting to a primary vendor strategy worldwide will enable Cisco to advance test security through the deployment of advanced biometric technologies, facilitate the rapid localization of exams around the world, and allow for increased certification scalability and coverage."

Surprisingly, Microsoft has announced that it is no longer going to be using Vue, and will be settling on Prometric as its sole provider starting Sept. 1.

Heaven forbid they both agree on the same company and allow economies
of scale kick in!

Lest we forget, we're talking about the delivery of mainly multiple-choice exams here - just slightly more rigorous than true/false. Just the fact that two certification giants still use any multiple-choice questions instead of hands-on labs is enough to make your head swim.

If testing is really important to vendors, why, oh, why, don't they invest in some testing centers of their own? Then you could have centers where exam administrators know what they're talking about and not just how to verify an ID. You could have test centers where you could do more than randomly pick A because it sounds better than the other choices. Maybe you could even type in
commands, install, configure and do something!

Best of all, you could have test centers which have greater requirements than those set by the current vendors for testing machines: Pentium III, 1 GHz, 512MB RAM, dial-up Internet connection and IE 6.0.