Scaled Agile, Inc. uses Testing Industry Standards to determine the length of each exam.
When an exam is developed, there are several key variables that will impact the exam duration:
The number and type of questions (multiple choice, true/false, scenario)
Difficulty of subject matter
Grammar and localization considerations
Domain area
Audience
Exam duration is also dependent on whether the intent of the exam is to test knowledge acquired (closed book) or to use it for assessment and learning purposes (open book).
When reviewing a randomized cross-section of over 200 exams across 23* Certification Programs in IT and similar industries, the average time allotted per question is 91.5 seconds, or just over a minute and a half. This includes exams ranging from 30 to 200 questions and exam times ranging from 50 minutes to five hours. Many programs make time accommodations for non-native English speakers either by extending the overall exam by a fixed amount, such as 30 minutes, or by building in extra time on a per-question basis (such as 30 extra seconds per question).
Based on these industry standards, Scaled Agile provides two minutes per question for each exam. How does this time per question break down? Let’s use the SPC 5 exam as an example.
Total number of questions: 60
Exam time: 120 minutes
Total word count for exam: 3500
Average Reading Rate: 150 words per minute**
Read through entire exam: 24 minutes (~25 seconds per question based on above reading rate)
Answer all questions: 60 minutes (~60 seconds per question)
Additional time: 36 minutes (~35 seconds per question for accommodations such as non-native English speakers, slower reading pace, additional time to review unanswered questions, reconfirm answers, etc.)
Total time per question: 2 minutes
Above numbers have been averaged and rounded for example purposes. Some questions will take more or less time to answer than the averages above.
A lot goes into establishing an appropriate exam time. Scaled Agile makes every effort to ensure time on each exam is fair for all testing candidates and supports the overall goal for measuring candidate knowledge.
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*IBM, Oracle, Adobe, Microsoft, IC3, Scrum.org, Scrum Alliance, SAS Institute, Cisco, PMI, CompTIA, NetApp, Amazon Web Services, ITIL, Citrix, VMWare, ISACA, ISC(2), ICECC, Salesforce, SAP, ASQ
**Based on an adult average reading rate of 150 English words per minute (184±29 = 155 WPM) . Sourced from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_listening