The PR Society, with its New York and New Jersey chapters assisting, has set up a four-day intensive “boot camp” in New York that takes candidates from the accreditation Readiness Review to the actual exam three days later.
PRS and the Universal Accreditation Board, of which PRS is a member, have been concerned that many who register to take the exam do not follow through by passing the Readiness Review and do not eventually take the exam.
Candidates must register by Friday, July 24 for the pioneer program, paying a total of $585 for the full schedule. The exam by itself is $385.
Felicia Blow |
Felicia Blow, director of PA, Cox Communications, Chesapeake, Va., is chair of the UAB, and vice-chairs are Jay Rayburn, associate professor, Dept. of Communications, Florida State University, and Anne Dubois, Dubois Betourne & Assocs., Palm Coast, Fla.
Candidates may choose to attend the first day of instructions for $75 or may take the second two days and pay $125.
The tutorial sessions will last from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 26; from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 27, and from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Aug. 28. On Saturday, Aug. 29, candidates will take the 3.5-hour test starting at 8 a.m. at the Prometric Testing Center, 1 Penn Plaza.
Michele Hujber of PRS/NJ will run the Aug. 26 program, reviewing 16 knowledge, skills and abilities (KSAs) needed by APRs. Readiness Reviews will also be conducted.
Bob Saline, APR chair, Central Pennsylvania, and CEO, PRWorks, will conduct classes for 44 remaining KSAs on Aug. 27. Jason Kirsch, APR co-chair, Central Pennsylvania, will continue teaching the 44 KSAs and conduct remaining Readiness Reviews.
The first six years of the new 3.5-hour computer-administered, multiple-choice exam, which were completed June 30, has created only about 660 new Society APRs or about 110 yearly.
The previous all-day exam, which involved an afternoon of writing, had created an average of 259 new APRs in the six years from 1996-2001. A record number of 352 Society members became APR in 1996.
In the years from 1986 to1992, more than 300 APRs were created in each year with 346 being created in 1992.
The exam was costly to administer since an outside service was required to grade the written part.
The loss reported by the Society on APR for 1986 through 2001 was $2,926,080. In 2000, the subsidy for a member becoming APR was $1,794 as the total cost of $591,541 that year exceeded income by $441,467. Created that year were 246 new Society APRs.
PRS Is Part of UAB
The Society in 1998 joined the Universal Accreditation Board which now includes eight other groups.
PRS members account for about 80% of those passing the test. As of March 2009, 821 PR people in all nine groups had become APR in five years and nine months of the program.
With PRS having at least 18,000 non-APR members who are eligible and at least 5,000 eligible members in the other groups, annual participating in the UAB process is less than two percent of eligibles.
The UAB website, www.praccreditation.org, in 2008 put 20 sample APR questions on its website and that story was one of the most accessed on odwyerpr.com which carried a link to the questions.
Critics of the test included one person who said he had no formal training in PR but nevertheless answered 18 of the 20 questions correctly.
Another said that some of the questions could be answered several ways. One question was on “courtesy bias” and a PR pro who took the test said this required knowledge of what the UAB meant by “courtesy bias.”
Michael Tullier, 2008 UAB chair, wrote that the test was just a demonstration of the test environment rather than the real questions and the purpose was to ease “test anxiety.”
It is not fair to say that someone who passed the sample test could also pass the real test, he wrote.
Experienced PR Pro Flunked Test
Cyndee Wolley, president of the Gulf Coast chapter, told a PRS teleconference Jan. 15, 2009 that “one of the best PR people I know of” in Florida took the APR test and flunked.
This person, whom Wolley would not identify when asked by this website, told Wolley that she wanted her money back but that PRS would not give it.
Wolley said PR pros with many years of experience should be able to trade that for an APR, which was created in 1965. |