It has been about six weeks since Oracle Certification Practice Tests were made available to the public. The initial response to the exams has been greater than I anticipated. That is gratifying for me, but it also good news to certification candidates who may have been considering taking one or more of the tests. The per-test costs that I pay to the site hosting the tests drop with increased volume. In addition, my pricing goal for the tests is not to charge 'all that the market will bear'. Instead my intent is to charge an amount that will allow me to recoup the man-hours I put into creating the tests. Because the sales volume is higher than anticipated, it has become possible to charge a lower price and still meet the target amount set to recoup my labor investment. The upshot of this is that I have dropped the price of taking an Oracle Certification Prep practice test from $19.50 to $14.50, effective immediately.
What may seem a bit counter intuitive is that this announcement is good news from my perspective as well. One of the reasons that I developed these practice tests was to make brain dumps a little less attractive to certification candidates. Brain dumps are a cancer on the Oracle Certification program and I have written numerous articles on why they should be avoided. That said, I believe that some people use them not so much because they want to cheat, but because they have limited resources to spend on study materials and brain dumps can often be obtained for free.
I created the Oracle Certification Prep study guides as a low-cost method for obtaining structured study materials to prepare for exams without resorting to brain dumps. The Oracle Certification Prep web site was developed to provide links to legitimate materials that exam takers could access for no cost to prepare for the exams. The practice tests are a logical extension to the study guides and the website. They provide a low-cost and certification-safe method for people who want to get a feel for the type of questions that will be asked on the exam.
Some people will continue to use brain dumps no matter what type, quality, or cost of materials I make available. However, I can at least hope that I can steer some people away from 'The Dark Side' by making less expensive preparation materials available. In that respect, today's price drop makes the Oracle Certification practice tests a more compelling option to someone considering using a brain dump.
For the next three weeks (until March 28th), you can get an even better deal that that. The following promotional code will allow you to take $4 off the price of an exam: OCP2_4CLAMS. With that code, you can take an exam for just over ten bucks.