Exam Director Scott Bickham just announced that the online entrance exam (at bjcp.coursewebs.com) has been updated to cover the 2015 BJCP Style Guidelines (don’t worry, you can still test against the 2008 Guidelines until the end of 2015), and also provided a new status update on the revision process discussed last month:
The English version BJCP entrance exam is now available in versions based on the 2008 and 2015 Style Guidelines. The Spanish and Portuguese versions will follow in a few months after the volunteers who are translating the style guidelines can turn their attention to the 3400 questions that feed into each 200 question exam. The exam based on the 2008 guidelines will be available until the end of the year, after which all Beer Judging exams will be based on the 2015 Style Guidelines.
The new questions were written to better closely match the style descriptions, and the grammar and punctuation errors were cleaned up to improve the readability and to make them easier to translated into other languages. A number of problem questions with either incorrect or ambiguous answers were either corrected or removed, so this should provide additional incentives to take the 2015 version of the BJCP Entrance exam. As noted in the previous update, questions on three historical styles (Roggenbier, London Brown Ale and Pre-Prohibition Lager) were removed, but new questions were added on styles in the European Sour Beer Category. The styles tested on the exam come from Categories 1-26; however there are currently no questions on the Specialty IPA since these styles have not yet proliferated to some parts of the US let alone our international judging community. We will add questions on these styles at some point, but will post a message on our website communicating the date when the new questions will be integrated into the exam.