Yesterday I successfully completed EC-Council’s CEH Practical exam.
While I had great things to say about my prior two certifications, this one left a sour taste in my mouth.
I was able to take this certification for relatively cheap, as EC-Council had a scholarship program for it on their website recently. I was selected as a recipient of their scholarship, and was informed that there was a $99 processing fee (likely to cover the costs of remote proctoring).
Prior to paying, I reached out to their support team to see if this was just a certification voucher, or if training was included as well. I was informed that training material was included along with the certiifcation attempt, so I promptly paid my fee and waited to receive access to the course material.
A couple of days later, I was provided access, and I logged into their portal to find out that I was misinformed. There was no training included, and it was only the certification attempt. I was a bit frustrated by this, so I reached out to their support team via email. I essentially received a response that there wasn’t any training material for the course, so I was on my own.
This angered me even more, but at this point I had paid for this certification attempt, but I went ahead and looked into scheduling it. This quickly became my second source of frustration. After logging into their portal to select a date/time to take the exam, I found out that the earliest available time for me was nearly a month out, and the latest time slot available was 2 PM Eastern.
At this point I was thankful I was only out $99, as I would have been very disappointed if I had paid more for this certification than that.
A month later, I logged in and took the exam with a proctor watching everything remotely. The exam was 20 questions and was pretty basic. Honestly, the hardest part was understanding a few of the questions as they were extremely vague. Overall, I spent just over 2.5 hours of the 6 hours allowed on my attempt, and once I submitted it I found out that I had passed the examination pretty much immediately.
I was relieved I passed, but overall this whole experience soured me from taking another EC-Council certification in the future. The lack of material, poor examination questions, and lack of better proctoring time slots irked me greatly.