From: nrf (noglikirf@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Oct 12 2007 - 06:08:00 ART
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darby Weaver" <darbyweaver@yahoo.com>
To: "Scott Morris" <smorris@ipexpert.com>; "'nrf'" <noglikirf@hotmail.com>;
"'Rahmlow, Howard F.'" <Howard.F.Rahmlow@unisys.com>;
<sheherezada@gmail.com>
Cc: "'Burkett, Michael'" <Michael.Burkett@c-a-m.com>; "'Brad Ellis'"
<brad@ccbootcamp.com>; "'Christopher M. Heffner'"
<cheffner@certified-labs.com>; "'Eric Dobyns'" <eric_dobyns@yahoo.com>;
"'Brian Dennis'" <bdennis@internetworkexpert.com>; <ccielab@groupstudy.com>;
<security@groupstudy.com>; <comserv@groupstudy.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 11:51 PM
Subject: RE: CCIE Lab Price Increase
> NRF,
>
> It sounds like you are saying that a person who
> schedules a lab, pas for it, and shows up is wasting a
> seat?
Uh, no. When did I say that?
I said that there are SOME people who are clearly not intending to use their
seats for the intended purpose, which is to take a well-prepared and serious
shot at actually passing the exam. A CCIE lab attempt is not supposed to
be a game. You're supposed to take it very seriously.
The problem is that some people are not taking their attempts seriously.
Like I said, some people just view their initial attempts as 'practice
runs'. They don't really bother to properly prepare because they know they
can just try again in another month, and the month after that, and the month
after that, etc. etc.
Of course, it is obviously true that you can prepare very seriously and
still fail. That's why I never said that everybody fails wasn't being
serious. But SOME people who failed were not being serious. The question
is how you then distinguish the two. While obviously there is no foolproof
way, I posited that a person who failed a certain number of times (say over
10 or 20) probably wasn't being very serious, at least in his early
attempts. Hence, the notion of an information signal or threshold would
serve to deter some people from just using a bunch of early attempts as
practice runs. It would encourage better preparation for each attempt.
More importantly, like I said, it would free up seats because it would
discourage serial-test-takers from taking a seat every month.
>
> I'm not sure I buy it.
>
> You see I went to the lab 3 times and some times it
> was hard to find a seat earlier or even later or even
> on my own sceheduled date for that matter.
Exactly. It's hard to find open seats on the days that you want them. But
why? Partly because some of those seats were occupied by people who are
taking the exam over and over again. If those guys were discouraged from
doing that, the chances of your finding an open seat would improve.
I don't see why this is a difficult point to understand. Perhaps I am not
explaining it clearly enough? If somebody fails the exam 20 times, he has
potentially denied seats to 20 other people. I think that's pretty
straightforward.
Now, that doesn't mean that I expect everybody to pass on their first
attempt. But what I am saying is that there has to be SOME mechanism to
discourage people from just hogging a whole bunch of seats and hence
preventing others from using them.
Let me put it to you this way. What if you could free up one particular day
in your work schedule to take the exam for the first time, and you studied
extremely diligently for the exam, but couldn't even get a seat on that day
(and so you couldn't take the exam at all) only to find out that the reason
you couldn't get a seat was because somebody out there had booked it for his
21st attempt? I think it would be reasonable for you to say, look buddy,
you had 20 previous chances, you should be made to think before you occupy
another seat for attempt #21.
What I could also see is some sort of QoS mechanism where somebody who just
keeps booking the exam over and over again would get lower and lower
priority on the queue in order to free up "bandwidth" for others. In this
case, the 'bandwidth' would be seats. We have to have a system that
discourages users from hogging bandwidth (seats). For example, somebody
who is booking their 21st attempt might have to be made to give up their
seats to those who are booking their very first attempt. Again, the idea is
that if you've already had 20 shots at it, you should be made to give other
people a chance. You can't just keeping taking shots over and over again
and thereby hindering others from having their chance.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Nov 16 2007 - 13:11:14 ART