Some important news that affects CCIE candidates may have slipped under the radar (I certainly missed this and just happen to stumble across it here). If you go to 36 minutes into this video you will see first hand details of the policy changes.
CCIE Written Exam
Candidates will only be allowed to sit the same Written exam 4 times per calendar year. This applies regardless of whether you pass or fail.
Also if you fail a Written exam you are going to have to wait 15 days to resit (as opposed to 5 days).
CCIE Lab Exam
This is a big change. There could be folks out there who sit the lab every 30 days on an ongoing basis (for questionable reasons). It won’t be possible with the new rules since the 30 day policy will only apply between attempts #1 and #2. There is a 90 day window that needs to elapse before attempt #3 can be made. The 90 day window applies between attempt #3 and #4 and also attempt #4 and #5. Thereafter, you have to wait a whopping 180 days for every subsequent attempt. These changes apply for all tracks and are applicable from Aug 1 2014.
So let’s just pretend poor Jo Blo passed the lab on the 7th attempt. He would have passed the lab 660 days days after his first attempt (give or take a few days since I think the countdown starts the day after each lab attempt). How did I get 660:
Review Lab for all tracks
The Re-read ability continues to be applicable for only the RS and SP tracks. In this instance the CCIE team will load the candidates final configurations and perform a full assessment.
Cisco will now add the ability for a candidate to request a second proctor to “review” their answers for an undisclosed fee. Presumably a candidate would only request a review in the event that they had failed and the outcome will either be “sorry you still failed” or an upgrade of status to “pass”. This is a new service for voice/collaboration and the other tracks.
In terms of Collaboration, clearly it is going to be very difficult for a complete re-read given that there are 14 or so virtual machines and an attachment between the MAC addresses of phones to the database of CM. But at least the review capability provides some way for an unsuccessful candidate to express their disappointment!
Rescheduling the Lab
There is a lot of information in the webcast but the final point I found most interesting concerns the current lack of ability for a candidate to reschedule their lab date within the 90 days of the test. That has changed (for a fee) and now candidates can reschedule their lab within the 90 day time frame. If a candidate has a lab date that is more than 90 days away then he/she can still reschedule for free but the rescheduling service within 90 days is new.
Vik Malhi, CCIE#13890
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VikMalhi
Twitter: @vikmalhi
I think this is a very good thing !
Obviously this has been done to avoid “dump companies” to release a new set of real labs every month.
But the counterpart of that is that if you rate limit the amount of attempts a CCIE candidate can have during a year, there is still no pre requisites regarding the CCIE Written exam.
Wonder, how about 18months validity of written exam – if the Lab attempt resit changes to said 90 and 180 days. Will it affect number of lab attempts?
Also is this applicable for CCDE? – CCDE lab is not available in daily basis as per current allocation of test centers and dates.
Hi Vik,
I would love to see a blog on Video Troubleshooting scenarios.
Let us know when your rack rental is ready.
Hi Vik,
I already stumbled on this….
Do you know if the counting begins as of august or already from january. For those already done some written attempts
Greetz from the netherlands, Ron
Hi Ron- sorry it took so long. counting begins retrospectively (i.e total # of attempts regardless of whether attempt was before Aug or not.