CCIE Journey recently attended Networkers in SF and has a nice recap of the event, particularly from a CCIE candidate’s perspective. Definitely surf on over and give it a read.
There was a lot of speculation that the recent introduction of the Core Knowledge section to the CCIE lab was to curb cheating via leaked or brain-dumped labs. A lot of that speculation centered around the Beijing, China lab location. CCIE Journey’s post contains a nugget that may give validation to some of that speculation:
Monday was my eight hour lab day with a lab written by a proctor just for Cisco Live. We learned a lot in that class. We learned that the pass rate of the Beijing lab was running at 90% before they implemented the open-ended questions.
CCIE Journey shares my concern that we’re all now paying the price for possible rampant cheating at a specific location. There is a possible bright side to this though:
He [the proctor] also hinted that the open-ended questions were a quick band aid for stopping the brain dumps and might come off in the near future. Maybe the troubleshooting section of the 4.0 lab will be enough?
I think that this makes sense. Troubleshooting is a better filter than a four question quiz. I tend to doubt that the Core Knowledge section will go away though. The Core Knowledge questions are only ever used one time. This means that they are essentially “un-dumpable”. Of course, it also means that the questions may have the tendency to become more and more difficult as the obvious questions are used and discarded.
