I'm Looking for information from those who have run or launched certification programs.

Specifically looking for opinions on two items

• Increasing registrations
  
• Score report format
  

The certification I am dealing with is an industry certification, not an internal company certification. All the typical marketing/PR items have been covered, and my question is more around educational resources to tap for spreading the word.

For the exam report, I'm on the fence of providing a passing candidate a score report which shows # of questions correct along with # needed to pass. I'm concerned this will promote behavior of candidates to only learn 'enough' of the knowledge to pass the exam, and not study all knowledge areas the exam tests for. The goal of the cert is to provide an industry recognized, credible certification to identify individuals who have mastered the objectives of the exam.

Thoughts?

I have been responsible for an industry type certification program for almost 10 years. In the beginning we included the percent grade and informed them through marketing material the percent required to pass (70%). We have also always included remedial training recommendations for 6-8 topical areas, pass or fail. The grading schema includes various categories and the passing criteria is 70% in each of as many as 3 categories. We found many test takers wanted to know specifics about their grade, even one person that scored 93% and wanted to know what they missed. We switched to only providing Certification Achieved or Certification Not Achieved as the "grade" along with the remedial recommendations and our inquiry count dropped to practically zero.