This offers a supply of canidates, better interaction with the community, and also draws attention to the various user groups. The status and standing of the user group could possibly be leveraged to provide policing of the proctors. (Not real sure how that would work)
Bob Martin
Tillman Hodgson wrote:
On Wed, Mar 16, 2005 at 11:41:05AM -0500, Jim Brown wrote:
Agreed. Some sort of proctoring will make sure we are testing the
person. Not the persons guru friend.
We've kicked around ideas about proctoring. Some options are costly.
While I don't have any numbers (obviously :-)) I imagine it's still less costly than involving testing centers, especially considering that it's not a commercial cert but rather a community cert.
Thinking broadly- what options do you see?
In thinking about this, I focused on that idea that being a community- driven cert can be *beneficial*. If we leverage the community we might be able to make proctoring both cost effective and easy ...
One idea:
Imagine that the BSD cert has an "official proctor" designation. While this doesn't pay, to maintain the designation one must proctor X exams in period Y. If the official proctor designation is made sufficiently sexy (say, tied to achieving a high score on one's own test and resulting in public recognition on bsdcertification.org as well as other creative ideas I'd love to hear other people chime in with) I believe that we'd attract enough folks to make this work. This is similar in concept to how SANS GIAC _used_ to get it's graders for the practical component. (I'm still bitter about them dropping the practical and thereby devaluing my cert. Sigh.)
The downsides are that the "sexiness" factor has to be maintained, a method to audit/evaluate individual proctors needs to be devised and put into use, and that growth (in terms of number of BSD certified folks) is going to be slower and more organic in nature. NYC won't be bad, but it'll take a long time before somebody passes through where I live ;-)
There are some workarounds for the growth issue ... allowing the
original group (who likely won't be able to take the tests _anyway_) to
proctor provided that they're in good standing with bsdcertification.org
and hold some industry-recognized certification (LPI, SAGE, RHCE, etc)
might work. Partnering by allowing proctors from other cert programs
that bsdcertification.org is willing to "whitelist" as doing a good job
of managing their proctors (CISSP comes to mind) might also work.
Piggy-backing on events like BSDCan can "seed" new geographical areas by
sending back newly certified proctors.
Managing proctors is a big issue. The reputation of the cert is, in some ways, tied to our ability to accurately verify identity. When using proctors, this means that our ability to "police" the proctors thus becomes part of the credibility of the cert itself. So, in addition to the "sexiness" carrot to attract the free labour in the first place, we need some sort of good-behaviour-ensuring stick.
There's other ideas I have for how to help proctoring work, but I've run out of time at the moment ;-)
-T
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