Continuing with our fascination of the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) lab exam, which is apparently harder to pass than the State Bar of California or the Certified Public Accounting Exam (read my colleague's article), I thought I'd pin down the Cisco employees who are responsible for creating those 8-hour lab exams.

I wanted to find out how they create those exam questions. I wanted to know how they feel about putting candidates through so much stress and whether they themselves passed first try. Here's my Q&A with Cisco's Elaine Lopes, CCIE program manager (and multiple CCIE). She oversees the exam development process for the CCIE team.

Q: What are the qualifications of the subject matter experts (SME) who help to create the exams?

A: The SMEs involved in CCIE exam development are technical experts with significant experience in either technical support, sales support, support escalations or product development. They are familiar with the use of Cisco gear in real-world customer requirements. Many of them are CCIE certified and all of them are familiar with the certification process and Cisco's standards for exam development.

Q: What is the process of developing a CCIE lab exam?

A: The SMEs collaborate to develop a lab blueprint of topics an expert should be knowledgeable about. Feedback on the blueprint and related question objectives is sought from Cisco's technology groups and business units, Cisco's technical support organization, Cisco's technical sales team, Customer Advisory Boards, and customer surveys. Cisco uses industry standard exam development practices, rigorous quality control, and a highly-controlled project management process to develop the labs. All exams are pretested before being released into production with real candidates. After release, we continue to monitor exams to ensure they are performing as required.

Q: How many SMEs work on the CCIE lab exam?

A: Lab exams are created using a virtual team of experts from across Cisco and the size of the team varies depending on the topic areas and the breadth of the experts on the team.

Q: How do you design the questions/scenarios?

A: We use a virtual team and collaborative approach to develop questions based on real-world situations the team has encountered in their work. One scenario will form the basis for a series of interrelated questions that cover various topics on the exam blueprint.

Jon Brodkin is senior writer at Network World.