New marks for Intermediate courses

APMG have issued a short paper detailing the expected marking pattern for the upcoming:

Service Lifecycle
Service Capability and
Managing across the Lifecycle courses.

Collectively the 10 courses in this area are referred to as Intermediate level.

All exams will be "Complex multiple choice". 8 questions. The pass mark will be 28 out of a possible 40 marks maximum (or 70%).

5 marks will be awarded for the correct answer
3 marks for partially correct answer
1 mark for the least correct answer
0 marks for the incorrect answer

How will it work... ?

Examples.
Partially correct answers on all 8 questions - you will fail the exam... (8 * 3 = 24).

Correct answers on 4 questions, partially correct on 2 and wrong on 2 - you will fail the exam (4*5 + 2*3 = 2*0 = 26)

Correct answers on 5 and least correct on 3 - you will PASS (5*5 + 3*1 = 28).

First set of exams is available from October 1 2008. The remainder are available from January 1st 2009.

Just when you thought it was safe.... New ITIL exams

The latest set of draft syllabus for the ITIL v3 Intermediate courses have been published by APMG.

You may have heard that the Intermediate courses which encompass the five Service Lifecycle, four Service Capability and Managing Across the Lifecycle courses will be released in two waves.

Wave 1 - October 1st 2008 sees exams available to the public for Service Transition, Service Operation, Release, Control and Validation, Operational Support and Analysis and Service Offerings and Agreements.

Having seen the syllabi I can report that there are some changes from the draft syllabi that were produced several weeks ago. The most notable and probably of greatest interest is the exam format in all of the courses.

8 multiple choice questions !

So you are thinking that can't be too bad; but if you consider that the exam is 90 minutes long you get the idea that these are not simple questions.

In fact the questions are scenario based, each with 4 possible answers and (get this) there are varying degrees of "correctness" for each of the 4 answers. Correct, no longer is one question right and the others wrong. Now there is a really right one that is worth 5 marks, a not quite so right one that is worth 3 marks, a answer that earns 1 mark and a "distracter" worth 0.

Love it or hate it, the pass mark for the exam is 65% or 26 marks out of a possible 40 marks. You can earn yourself a distinction by getting 30 marks (75%).

So that is the breaking news on the new exam format for ITIL v3 Intermediate courses.

Personally, the format does not appeal to me. Having a gradient scoring system is very subjective. In real life there are multiple ways to achieve a result, so in this regard it makes sense to have different "correct" answers. However, my view of what is the right way to deal with a situation will be different from someone else and the choice is dependant on many more factors than can be documented in an exam (e.g. emotions, experiences).