The Reason Behind the Core Knowledge Section?

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.