![[Table of Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
[The Assessments]A Parallel Postsecondary Universe: The Certification System in Information Technology - October 2000
45. The international guild system of information technology requires intermediary agents for certification. There are three testing companies that play major roles: Prometric (recently acquired from Sylvan Learning Systems by Thomson Corporation of Canada for $775 million), CatGlobal (a division of Houghton-Mifflin), and Virtual University Enterprises (VUE, a division of National Computer Systems). They are in the business of testing competence from everything from PowerPoint to C++ to the elements of the Citrix CCA and those of the major industry-certifications (MCSE, ODBA, etc.).
46. The global accessibility of these companies is stunning. Prometric operates about 2,500 testing centers in 140 countries. VUE has nearly 1500 locations, including 20 in Mexico, 28 in Russia, 23 in Brazil, 19 in South Africa, 50 in China, and others in Senegal, Kenya, Oman, Namibia, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Angola, Albania, and Honduras--among other places. CatGlobal offers wholly on-line computer-based testing from servers in 16 countries, and takes mobile testing centers to vendor expositions (in 1999, it administered 2,600 certification exams for Lotus at European expositions alone). Some of these testing "centers" are located at the sites of "training partners," presumably for convenience, and some are free-standing.
Because most of the assessments are delivered by computer on a daily basis, and because the candidate encounters a randomized selection of prompts from an item pool, test security standards meet the requirements of any client (vendor or industry association). An organization that wishes to establish itself as an authorized testing center for any of these corporations must undergo comprehensive and rigorous evaluation, particularly on test security and proctoring issues.
47. These organizations are key to any would-be accounting system of industry certification. Nobody else has as comprehensive knowledge of how many students attempt to pass which certifications, how many actually pass, and the distribution of attempts and successes by country in which the testing takes place and the national origin of the test-takers. But because the universe of testing companies is an oligopoly, they all regard this type of information as proprietary.
48. The testing, of course, is not free. A given certification may require as many as eight or nine examinations, the fees for each of which range from $50 to $250 (lower if the examinations come from an industry association and you are a member of that association). In CompTIA's pricing scheme, the fee to an employer falls with the volume of employees taking the examination. Pricing of examinations outside the U.S. varies widely by world region and vendor. For performance assessments with hands-on laboratories and simulations, the prospective examinee should count on $1,000. If one completes assessments on any three tracks of the Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert program, each of which requires both a paper examination and a laboratory performance, the total examination fee bill comes to $3,300.