Cheaters Beware – Cisco changes their testing procedures

A couple of articles recently have caught my attention concerning the way that Cisco was going to start administering their certification tests. The first article, Cisco and Pearson VUE Chart a New Course in IT Certification to Grow Global Networking Talent, simply states that beginning August 1st, Pearson Vue would be the exclusive delivery vendor for Cisco certification exams. This in and of itself is not Earthshaking news, Microsoft did the same thing last year proclaiming Prometric as its sole provider, but what got my attention was that they were also collaborating on increasing the security of the exam process as a whole. I already knew that VUE has some very specific requirements to be a VUE testing center (the New Horizons center that I work for is a certified testing center) so my eyes quickly scanned the article to see what the changes were going to be. I had to wait for a second article that was released a couple of days ago to see what the changes were going to be. The article, Cisco and Pearson VUE Combat Exam Fraud With Global Test Delivery Enhancements, states that there will be ‘advanced security enhancements’ in the form of digital pictures of the person taking the test and more importantly, ‘forensic analysis of testing data’. So what does ‘forensic analysis’ mean? Good question. What they will be looking for is ‘aberrant testing behavior’ and I can only assume this would mean that if you blaze through a test that is supposed to take 2 hours in 30 minutes, you could get flagged. One of my co-workers wondered if Cisco was going to acquire some of the available braindumps, analyze which questions were marked as correct on the dumps, but were in fact wrong and use these as a bellwether to flag if a person may be regurgitating what they memorized from a braindump. You may ask why Cisco (and hopefully some others…Microsoft are you paying attention?) is going to such great lengths to protect the sanctity of their tests. It really boils down to what the certifications mean to the outside world. If you are willing to pay a person more because they have certain credentials; then your company should have a reasonable expectation that the credentials are good and valid. If this trust is diminished by people cheating to pass the test, then maybe your company will look elsewhere for people (or companies) that do meet your requirements. This is big money folks. So let’s hope that all of the certification vendors follow Cisco and VUE’s lead so that the certifications that we studied so hard for actually mean something.