Bye-Bye Core Knowledge Section!

News that everyone has been expecting eagerly: Effective May 10th Cisco is taking the core knowledge section off the CCIE R&S and Voice lab exams! Over a year of existence, this part of the exam received most controversy of all. There has been a lot of things said about how flawed the idea of core knowledge testing was. Firstly, a test of four questions could never properly assess anyone's knowledge. Secondly, error margin was unacceptable high due to vaguely presented questions and unclear grading procedure. Lastly, some recent promo actions that Cisco ran created a lot of controversy in the CCIE community. However, good or bad, it's all gone now, and this fact should be a huge relief for many CCIE candidates. The time that has been previosly allocated to OEQs is now reallocated to the Configuration section, so you now have extra 30 minutes of configuration time.

What next? Hopefully, Cisco has a plan to deal with those who failed Core Knowledge before that change, but passed the Configuration section. Also, we sincerely hope Cisco would introduce more "fine-grained" procedures to thwart brain-dumpers and preserve the exam integrity. Plus, we still have to see Troubleshooting added to SP and Security tracks and OEQ eliminated there as well. We shall see!

UPDATE
The official information could be found at the CCIE page: http://www.cisco.com/ccie