With so much recent attention being focused on the continuing education elective requirements, I feel that I should take just a few moments to discuss the current 3 hour "core" requirement as well.

Despite the fact that the Commission monitors continuing education classes, and conducts yearly workshops for instructors, one complaint that we hear often concerns the quality of continuing education classes.

It is obvious that many licensees are unhappy with the practicality and timeliness of the material that they are receiving in their present 3 hours of "core" instruction.

I believe that the Commission has an affirmative duty to protect the licensees as consumers of these courses. To that end, I have been working to help develop material that would form a required "basis" to the current 3 hour requirement. There will still be room for each instructor to teach material that he/she has developed individually, but by requiring each lecture to have a strictly uniform foundation, we can better insure consistently high quality lectures from all of the schools/instructors.

The burden of developing this practical and informative "basis" rests on my shoulders, and the shoulders of the continuing education instructors. I would like, however, to solicit more material and insights from other sources, and I am inviting all licensees to please contribute any material that you believe should be included in the curriculum of a continuing education program.

So, if you are depressed by the prospect of investing another 3 hours listening to a continuing education lecture that you’re certain will be a waste of time, this could be your opportunity to make your life a little easier - and perhaps even improve the profession of real estate brokerage in New Hampshire.

If even 1% of the current 11,800 license holders would spend the minimal effort required to occasionally send something in, it could really help to make the continuing education experience much more positive and practical for everyone.

Many of the more veteran members of the New Hampshire real estate community probably still remember their initial exposure to real estate exams as a very frustrating experience.

That’s because some of the older exams did depend heavily on word manipulation at the expense, some say, of actually finding out what the test-takers knew about real estate.

While those days have been over for a while with the Commission's hiring of National Assessment Institute to administer them, we can expect the new broker and salesperson exams to lean even further in the opposite direction by emphasizing fairness and that which is actually useful in the practice of real estate.

Putting this theory into practice when preparing the November 1997 exam, the Commission and N.A.I. met with more than two dozen of the most experienced real estate professionals in New Hampshire as well as most of the real estate instructors, to define the subject matter that should be emphasized in the exam questions. This monitoring of NH practice will continue in the future with N.A.I. maintaining contact with the instructors via a newsletter, which will discuss changes on our upcoming exams, and seek their input.

Except for the fact that the north county examinees will have a new option of taking their exams in Laconia, all of the other logistical aspects of the exam will remain the same.

		EXAM DATE			DEADLINE DATE 

		 1/16/99			12/23/98

		 3/20/99			2/24/99

		 5/15/99			4/21/99

		 7/17/99			6/23/99

		 9/18/99			8/25/99

		 11/20/99			10/27/99