F5 Certified Practice Exams

Thomas - the short answer is that while we fully intend to deliver practice versions of our exams, we cannot tell you if, or even when, any will be released.

The longer answer: The value of our practice exams is that they are real, valid exams; i.e. we could have used them for production, but designated them as practice exams. This gives candidates a true assessment of their preparedness and expected performance on the production exam.

In order to do this, we need enough validated questions to build both a production exam as well as an independent practice version (no shared questions). In the case of 301b, we did not have sufficient beta participation to validate enough items to do this. We released the production version and are reviewing the performance of the pilot items on that exam to see if we can build a practice exam using these items (this happened this week). Although the psychometricians are still reviewing the data, the preliminary review suggested that we still do not have sufficient items to field a practice exam.

Frankly, we could put a practice exam out just for the sake of offering one; however, without being truly equivalent to the production version, it would make us look good, but be dishonest and not beneficial to candidates. I won't do that. Unless what we have has true value and is empirically capable of assessing production performance and producing valid guidance, I can't in good-conscious put it out there. That is not how we work.

BTW This is a good example of why candidate participation in exam development is so important. In addition to small-group participation in exam development, we also do a large-scale Job-Task Analysis Survey and Beta Exam for every exam version. Despite the fact the JTA survey allows candidates to provide real-world evaluations to determine what topics are included in the exam, we generally get very limited participation. The same goes for beta. We sent out over 4,000 invitations to the currently running 304Beta and as of today have less than 200 candidates who have taken or scheduled the exam. Based on this, I don't know if we will be able to field a practice exam for this upcoming exam either. I just don't know until all the data comes in.

Cheers,