It seems that cheating on certification exams is on the minds of a lot of people these days. Almost everywhere I go to read, someone is discussing exam cheating. Recently, Brian Summerfield, senior editor of Certification magazine (which is devoted to the IT industry) wrote an editorial about exam cheating. Summerfield suggests ways to reduce instances of cheating and boost the value of IT credentials.

While he certainly has good intentions with his ideas, I don’t think Summerfield has thought through the complexity and cost of his top suggestion:

Build in Performance-Based and Written Components. If a person has to demonstrate hands-on skills with or write a complex essay on a particular product or technology, this makes cheating much more problematic. It would be much more difficult to disseminate a step-by-step, comprehensive explanation on how to set up a server manually than to just post answers to a few questions. Plus, these testing methodologies generally carry more weight with employers, cheating or no cheating.

In a perfect world, performance-based testing would be the best way to verify that a person actually has the knowledge and skills to earn a credential. Believe me, we would love to be able to validate our Certified Professionals’ skills through hands-on testing and/or written essays. But…

A written component brings a whole new set of challenges. This approach now opens up the possibility of subjectivity in grading the exam. The exam is now only as strong as the person who is responsible for reading the written component and evaluating the results. There are two things we always try to strive for in a certification exam-- validity and reliability. The reliability component would now be very difficult to achieve because each candidate would be graded differently.

On a smaller scale, several years ago we even eliminated items that required a candidate to type in an answer because scoring became very difficult. An extra space or character could mark the item wrong when it was actually correct. There were so many variations of how an answer could be written that it became impossible to include all of the possibilities.

And because of the huge number of certification exams HP offers each year (tens of thousands), it is totally impractical if not outright impossible to check answers manually. Even if the written component were administered through Prometric testing centers, we would need to set up an entirely new way of receiving that information, grading it (which could mean several full time people with a breadth of expertise) and delivering it to the candidate. If test takers think exams are expensive now, imagine what the cost would be if we added this manual process!

As for adding a hands-on component to the tests, this is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Today, many of our certification exams are conducted around the world in proctored testing centers operated by Prometric. It would be prohibitively expensive to add the sophisticated equipment and knowledgeable people necessary for hands-on testing at these facilities.

The simple fact of the matter is that cheating on certification exams is not so big of a problem that we need to go to such lengths to try to prevent it. As I mentioned in a previous post, we build measures into our tests to help us detect the possibility of cheating. When one of those measures sends up a red flag, we can investigate the situation. For now, that is the most practical way to attack the problem and preserve the integrity of our credentials.