I have posed this question to Microsoft/Prometric and I may as well highlight this issue on BtL as well.
As you can probably guess, I live on the Gold Coast, Queensland Australia and we seem to not have a single training or examination centre on the coast.
All venues are currently located in Brisbane, about 100km to the north of us.
What is painful is having to take a full day off work if you live on the Coast (or work as I do also) to take an exam in Brisbane whereas we could be sitting an exam in the morning here and getting back to it for the afternoon.
The current population of the Gold Coast is 500,000 people. What is amusing is that town's like Taree which only have 20,000 people have established training/examination centres where we don't.
We have been advised also that there may be a venue at a local university which does offer the exams, however ONLY to their students. It's not open to the public.
Considering the Gold Coast is where TechEd was held last year it seems quite ironic that we don't these facilities on the Coast.
Personally if I could see a way of doing it I would become an MCT and start up something along these lines however that tends to require a awful amount of $$$!!
Thank you for reading...
Brad
Hi Brad,
I am not quite sure why you posted this post here, but thank you anyway.
However, one of the key reasons for NOT being a testing centre is that is very difficult with the current Prometric compensation offer to make any money from the deal. For example, we (in the UK) have tested maybe 200 learners over the last year and we earned.....Zilch, zero, nada, nothing from Prometric for our trouble. Seriously, I mean nothing.
As for your local university only allowing their students to take exams, I can see the reasoning, and maybe you could be humble when you ask them next time - appreciate that they earn nothing from the test, and maybe offer to sit the exam at their convenience and or buy them some flowers to brighten up the waiting area ;-)
We are a private test center also, but I do allow members of the public to test with us, so long as I have a spare seat and it fits into our exam schedule. We are in York however so it is a bit far to travel for you.
AFAIK anyone can apply to set up a testing centre, and in my opinion it is a) not difficult b) involves no application fee.
Gold Coast is a nice place, I was there last year visiting an old school buddy in Bonogin.
Take care
Andrew Bettany
Yes the biggest problem is the compensation per exam or lack thereof from prometric to give an inventive to set-up a test centre. over the last 11 years of taking MS and other exams (in the UK) I have seen the number of centres erode away and shorten their opening hours/days. And they really wash their hands off you if there is a problem with the testing software. Now in NZ it is the same experience so prometric the world over seems not to care whether that be dealing with the netherlands or whereever the oceania call centre is...malaysia?
Sorry as I seemed to have posted in the incorrect spot so whoever move the post to the correct location - Thank you!
Well this issue seems like there is more too it.
Considering in Australia, education facilities such as schools and universities, get government help (ie, my taxes) I can't see why I am not allowed to utilise the testing there. Prometric have asked them also as they did advise us that their testing facilities were never full. So it seems a little bit wasteful.
I think at the end of the day if you want a test centre you really need it also to be a training location to be profitable. Some of the fees that I have seen for courses are certainly up there which might attribute to the lack of funding for these centres to complete testing.
I can see now however this topic is larger than just the Gold Coast and has many underlying factors as to why we don't seem to have a testing/training centre at the moment.
But I highlight that other point I did make - TechEd was on the Gold Coast and is on again this year here. No training centres here...
Bonogin's a great place to Andrew, my mum lives out there and I work just over the road at Robina! Small world it would seem.
They may have an empty test centre but they do need a "qualified" training centre administrator to sign you in and out and invigilate the exam. And that person may not be full time in that role.