Official link coming soon.

The short version is if you take a class at an approved 360 vendor you can apply for a waiver to skip the OEQ’s on your lab date. While just 4 questions and 30 minutes you HAVE to pass that section to pass the lab. This means they are essentially eliminating 1/3 of the lab for you! I don’t like this. While my favorite instructor (Narbik) is 360 approved I think this is a bad idea. It gives people who used the Cisco preferred vendors 1/3 of their passing score before walking in and it give them an extra 30 minutes on what most see as the hardest section (configuration) because of lack of time. It is purely a money grab. I understand what Cisco wanted to do here, they wanted to eliminate the need for proctors to manually grad questions that open for interpretation. I relate this to back when I took drivers ed. Texas had just passed a law that if you took and passed drivers ed you no longer needed to pass a road test. Which was great, I did not need to mess with that test as I already knew how to drive! However not everyone knew how to drive but still got this exemtion because my drivers ed had not final test! If did all the work you passed. You think the drivers ed place is going to fail students who are then going to go tell their friend to go elsewhere? I see the potential for the same thing possibly happening here. Why would a 360 vendor deny a student a waiver? They are just going to Twitter/Group Study/etc and talk bad about them which is bad for business. I don’t want to imply vendors ARE going to give undeserving students waivers as I know a several of them will not do that. Just the potential for accusations of impropriety exist with this change.

While its too late to get Cisco to change they did say this is temporary but will give at least 60-days notice before it ends. So for at least the next 60 days its part of life, just need to deal with it. I do see this as the first step in removing the OEQ from the labs that have troubleshooting sections so that is a good thing.

On a side note about Narbik, he did say he is not in favor of this change while CCBootCamp is taking credit for the idea as theirs.