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An object lesson in PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam Success

August 30, 2007 @ PRINCE2(TM) Practice Blog from Patrick Mayfield

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There is quite a profound change happening in the next few days to the PRINCE2 Practitioner Exam. And we have had first hand experience of it.

My colleague Andrew Rock was leading a modular PRINCE2 Practitioner course in Cardiff when APM Group contacted us asking if we would like to pilot the new-style exam paper. We put the question to Andrew who was just about to lead his class into the second and final module of the course, and so asking them, he went ahead. We had the results back and every single candidate passed! So well done, Andrew, and well done all our brave clients.

Until next week the Practitioner exam is a 3-hour written exam against three compulsory questions. Candidates have consistently complained about this handwriting challenge: who writes furiously by hand for three hours these days?

Also, there were two other criticisms leveled at this whole system:

1. It was always possible for an examiner to miss awarding legitimate marks (human error) or for one examiner to mark more harshly than another. I can attest to this, having been the first Lead Moderator of the PRINCE2 Exam Board.
2. Human marking took so long - it was difficult for one examiner to mark carefully more than 20 papers in a day and so the turnaround from sitting to the release of results sometime took up to 14 weeks - that even with detailed feedback from the examiner few people could remember what they had written!

Now, from next week, the PRINCE2 Examinations Board is introducing objectively marked papers. These will appear to candidates as a set of three booklets:

1. A scenario booklet describing a hitherto unseen project story or scenario against which the application questions would be asked.
2. A question booklet covering now most of the PRINCE2 curriculum, with multiple choice and matched part-type question structures.
3. A machine-readable answer booklet to be completed by the candidate in pencil.

   

Turnaround from exam to release of results is expected to be shortened dramatically. In the case of Andrew's candidates this was two weeks.

We discussed this at our staff trainers' meeting earlier this week, and it was particularly pleasing since we had not altered our core Practitioner training course design at all.

We expect this style of exam to be much more popular globally, particularly within the USA, where professional assessments in project management have been much more towards multiple choice, rather than essay.

Note: the no change to the current Foundation Paper planned.

So we will be offering this new style Practitioner exam from now onwards.

[Source: Patrick Mayfield]

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