# Night before important exam **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 3, 2015, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/night-before-important-exam/736488 "2015-11-03T02:37:48Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 15
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [November 3, 2015, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/night-before-important-exam/736488/15 "2015-11-03T17:51:41Z")
> [@gotpasswords](#): > > …The last BIG certification exam I took requires being actively in the field for something like five or eight years in order to even be eligible to take it, so one night of cramming wasn’t going to be useful. Why do so many certifying organizations have prerequisites like this? Is it mostly to prevent crammers from “passing” and becoming incompetent “certified” practitioners, or is there something more? A big part of me is telling me that requiring prerequisites to take a certification exam is a cop-out and a tacit admission that the exam writers can’t be bothered to actually test for mastery of the material. If the test was actually good enough, then they could just let anyone take it and laugh all the way to the bank every time an incompetent person tried to cram for it. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/night-before-important-exam/736488)._