Do The CCIE Test Questions Need An Overhaul

I did a blog post in May 2008 with a suggestion to Cisco about their test question database. I had just passed my CCIE recertification written test and had used the preparation tools offered by NetMaster Class (Bruce Caslow, #3139 and Val Pavlichenko, #3765). I continued to see a high incidence of repeat questions on the Cisco written test. My rough guess was that the test database was about 400 questions, which was verified by someone at Cisco. This small database makes it easy for brain-dump organizations to track question changes and to have a market for their offerings.

My suggestion is to increase the question database to over 1000 questions. I think that's a low number. Even better would be a test database of over 2000 questions or perhaps even 3000 questions. Why not allow the people in the industry to submit questions (and maybe even answers) to Cisco to help populate the test database? Guidelines could be published and Cisco would then only have to validate the questions and answers prior to including them in the test database.

With that quantity of questions, memorizing the test questions and answers becomes much more difficult. You really have to understand the technology and be able to properly answer the questions. Interestingly, one of the folks at Netcordia was just going through airplane pilot and commercial rating training. He said that the FAA database is approximately 1000 questions and that they are required to publish the questions and answers. While it is possible to nearly memorize (for most of us) all 1000 questions, I was curious if that large a corpus would help someone better understand the topic. When I asked this person about whether it helped or hindered his understanding of the topic, he indicated that it helped. Training companies could then cover the technology in ways that facilitate answering the test questions (I'm not suggesting teaching to the test – teach the technology thoroughly enough to allow someone to successfully pass the test).

Cisco could contract with a few of the training companies to generate questions and answers. Each contractor could generate 100 or 200 questions and only have visibility into a portion of the full database. These people could then participate in the certification themselves.

One of the problems I have with the current test database is that the Cisco employees who create the questions are having problems finding questions that test understanding of a technology. Once a good question is created, it doesn't take long for the brain-dump organizations to learn the question and publish the right answer. So the Cisco folks then engage in a game in which they try to come up with new questions. Unfortunately, there are only so many questions you can ask about a given topic before you've exhausted the set of good questions. The Cisco folks are then tempted to start asking questions about technology trivia.

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