Are training providers experiencing a drop in certification pass rates since ITIL V3 Foundation syllabus was revised?
The word on the street is that they are! One training provider's blog suggested that since the latest revision of the syllabus perhaps "the exam was quite different from the course materials and the sample exam".
Ivanka Menken's blog said the following:
As of 1st of May all training providers are offering new materials based on the updated training and exam requirements.
A quick check with a number of providers shows that from the 1st of July the percentage of successful candidates has decreased quite dramatically for Foundation exam participants. Also – the average results has dropped from 85% -90% to as low as 70 percent...
IF you are one of the candidates that sat your Foundation exam AFTER the 1st of May 2009 and you feel that the exam was quite different from the course materials and the sample exam... contact your training provider and let them know!
I've heard rumblings of the same elsewhere though most ATOs are too wimpy to speak out on this sort of thing. Not Ivanka! as all who know her will testify. (I welcome links to anyone else speaking out)
As Ivanka says you should talk to your ATO who will talk to their EI who will talk to APMG who will talk to the Chief Examiner who will assemble the ITIL Qualifications Board who will discuss the issue and look into... Add your voice to the clamour.
I think you should also speak out on the Web. Apply a little flame to the toes. After two years they ought to be getting better at this.
I've seen occasional leaks of stats for pass rates but I suspect they were at the EI level. Is there any formal evaluation of the overall ITIL training program performance? Do OGC or APMG do Service Level monitoring of ITIL certification?
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
Hard to tell yet but I think not
Skep, as you've blogged already EXIN are suffering some "teething problems" so we've only seen one set of results post 1st May. That was a 100% pass rate for a closed (single-company) course so perhaps not indicative.
Having read Ivanka's post, I'd agree that some of there's a slight mismatch between syllabus and exam. I've been told by two delegates that things which are supposedly now outside the syllabus came up in the exam.
Duncan
Foundation syllabus woes
Yes, we've felt an impact in our classes. Most seriously, there have been numerous reports by our students of questions on post-revision exams which fell outside the new syllabus. Having trained many thousands of students, we have a relatively stabilized notion of what our pass rates should be, e.g. 97%. This last round of exams (four classes in May) was markedly lower, e.g. 85%.
My feeling is that quite a bit of maturation has yet to occur in the ITIL certification bureaucracy. Exam quality is still substantially less than it should be. Question wordiing is unnecessarily obtuse. We've seen repeat questions on exams. The testing software used by the examiners has significant faults. Post-exam feedback provided by some online examiners is incomplete. There's no such thing as an adaptive ITIL exam yet. Lots of work to do.
We're taking countermeasures to ensure consistency in learning outcomes regardless of the air cover provided by the certification hierarchy.