An Open Letter to VMware Certification / Education

[cswaters1]

http://craigwaters.org/2014/12/21/open-letter-to-vmware-certificationeducation/

Dear VMware Certification/Education,

I wanted to get an explanation for the problems I experienced recently when I sat my VCAP5-DCD VDCD550 exam in Australia on Wednesday 17th December 2014.

Here is my response in Twitter just after the exam, as you can see not the best exam experience…

What makes matters worse is this post@uber_tech_geek shared with me today, I am really concerned that you let me sit an exam which from this post clearly has technical problems having been withdrawn until mid January.  I feel I should not have had to go through this 5 hours of wasted time and that VMware could have prevented this from happening.

https://plus.google.com/110782369029946887024/posts/2TeeuakQTE6

To confirm this I tried to rebook this exam (I am yet to receive any reply from PearsonVue about rescheduling my exam) and to confirmed that I am currently unable to reschedule my Exam until after January 15 2015.

I look forward to your reply and the opportunity to working with you to resolve this situation and move forward with (at a minimum) a resit of this exam.

I am yet to gain any response from VMware Certification or PearsonVue as to why my exam failed and resulted in an invalid exam experience.  The purpose of this letter is to recognise the time I’ve wasted along with resolving this issue for future exam participants and generally improving the whole VCAP exam experience.

I had a great VCAP-DCA exam experience, so it has come as a really big disappointed with the VCAP-DCD exam, especially when VMware havepublicly announced the retirement of the VCAP 5.1 exams.

[jonhall]

Hello all,

VMware puts a lot of effort into the quality of our exams, and as Craig has pointed out here with the VCAP-DCA exam, we are mostly successful. However, once in awhile we discover an issue that needs to be rectified. We recently looked at the VCAP-DCD 5.5 exam and decided we needed to make some improvements to the exam. In particular, we have had some issues where, depending on what location a candidate went to take the exam, there were crashes with the flash component. This could be a resource issue or flash version issue at the exam site, which we have limited control of.  But what we can do is work on reducing the resource requirements of the exam and widen the flash compatibility, which we are currently working on. While we are working on this we wanted to ensure that no other candidates experienced this issue, so we have temporarily suspended the exam.

We are currently working through cases where these crashes have occurred, and if you have filed a case like this and haven't heard from us, you should hear from us shortly with a resolution.

Regards,

Jon C. Hall

Sr. Manager, Technical Certification Development

VMware, Inc.

[shahed_hasib]

Hi,

I sat for the vmware vcap-dcd on last August 27,2014 and failed. The in-exam design tools crashes two time which was the main cause for wasting of at least 30 minutes of my time. I got 281 marks which is just near to that pass mark. I sat for the exam on a pearson VUE testing center in Bangladesh (which is the only one pearson VUE testing center in Bangladesh who can take VCAP-DCD). I will sit again for the new VCAP5-DCD exam on Feb 17,2015 (already scheduled). Hope vmware can recover for the previous problems.

Regards,

Shahed