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eligibility requirements had unintentionally excluded some of the
people for whom the CDP program was originally designed.” 54 The
committee dropped the specifi c course requirements, providing a grand-
father clause for those with three years' experience prior to 1965, and
requiring others to have only two years of postsecondary education.
Applications for the exam session in 1968 jumped back to almost three
thousand.
Over the next several years, the CDP program struggled to regain its
initial momentum. Annual enrollments dropped again briefl y in 1969,
then leveled off for the next several years at about twenty-seven hundred.
In an industry characterized by rapid expansion, this noticeable lack of
growth represented a clear failure of the CDP program. With each year
CDP holders came to represent a smaller and smaller percentage of the
programming community. In 1970 the program faced yet another crisis:
the announcement that a bachelor's degree would be required of all CDP
candidates, beginning with the examination in 1972. Once again a fi re-
storm of debate broke out. The DPMA claimed that this new require-
ment merely refl ected the changing realities of the labor market: since a
college degree had already become a de facto requirement within the
industry, requiring anything less for the CDP would severely undermine
its legitimacy. The resulting controversy highlighted already-existing ten-
sions within the data processing community, and further divided the
already-fragmented DPMA Certifi cation Council (many of whose own
members could not satisfy the new degree requirement). Numerous
observers called for the DPMA to relinquish control of the CDP exami-
nation to an independent certifi cation authority. By the mid-1970s
it became increasingly clear that the CDP program faced imminent
dissolution.
In an attempt to restore momentum to their fl agging certifi cation ini-
tiative, the DPMA joined forces with seven other computing societies—
the ACM, the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)
Computer Science Society, the Association for Computer Programmers
and Analysts, the Association for Education Data Systems, the Automation
One Association, the Canadian Information Processing Society, and the
Society of Certifi ed Data Processors (SCDP)—to form the Institute for
Certifi cation of Computer Professionals (ICCP). The DPMA had always
been extremely possessive of its certifi cation program, and its decision
to relinquish control to an independent foundation refl ects a growing
sense of desperation about the future of the CDP. 55 The ICCP was
charged with upgrading and expanding the CDP program, introducing
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