SJC Customs Training

It is never advisable to comment on something when one is not sure what to make of it, but here goes. The results of the latest Customs Broker License Exam (CBE) are in, and they are, to put it mildly, disheartening.  Less than 7% of those taking the exam passed, which according to fairly good sources, means fewer than 85 examinees (out of approximately 1200) received a passing score.  If that sounds OK, think about it this way: 1115 out of 1200 individuals came up short striving for a credential for their career aspirations.  That’s a lot of dashed hopes.

As noted  in my previous entry, the October 2009 exam contained an unprecedented number of questions that were nearly verbatim repeated from earlier exams–79 out of 80 in fact.  Makes the low pass rate seemingly surprising, this repeat ratio, does it not? Yes, even I was surprised even though I had never expected the rate to be as high as others had anticipated.  My thought was that the rate might reach the 20% level, not the 50% that some believed to be a possibility.  But 6.9%?!  What the . . .

As it turns out, we need not worry about a national epidemic of poor exam performance or even, poor preparation.  As it turns out, the national pass rate was, more or less, statistically predictable.  This is because–and here, we should be less surprised–the vast majority of the repeated questions on the exam originated from exams with very low pass rates.  According to one calculation, 60 of the 79 questions originated from exams that, cumulatively, had an average pass rate of 6.5%.  Even a casual review of those 60 questions, moreover, indicates that they, on average, were of the kind that caused the low pass rates for those earlier exams.  In other words, they weren’t the puff balls.

So, maybe you were lucky enough to have come across some of these questions during your honest preparation for the exam.  Maybe you even went over them with others or in a prep class.  Heck, maybe you even happened to bring them to the exam in case the complicated issues they raised came up again.   But, 60 of them?  No, as it turns out, those earlier pass rates were accurate: only a handful of folks could handle so many difficult questions.  Their large number overwhelmed any advantage that might have been gained from their familiar quality.

Which brings us to the question posed in the title of this entry, a question fraught with frustration of many of those 1115 folks who confronted this latest exam in good faith and, even, with hours of sincere preparation.  The question begs another question: whether to continue to study in good faith or to take a chance that CBP will again recycle previous questions to this large degree.  If the latter, then a reasonable course of action would be to study, organize and yes, even memorize questions according to topics.   But, that is a fairly risky approach.  CBP need only revert to their usual approach of creating new questions, leaving you, the question indexer, with little to rely on.

No, it appears that the best course continues to be one of good faith, albeit really good faith.   No doubt among the 85 or so successful candidates in October were some first-time exam takers, even though the majority were likely repeat takers who had a better “database” to work from, as far as previous question experience.  One can only guess that those first-time passers had studied and prepared so effectively that not even 60 of the hardest questions ever written could trip them up.  They may not have seen the questions before, but they could still answer them, based on their understanding of the issues and problems they posed.  So, their breadth and depth of knowledge, earned only through enormous preparation (how else?), won the day.

And that’s where we go . . . until, at least,  something else develops in the exam saga.