Hello all, I've been lurking since the day this was announced. Now that the chatter has slowed, I figured I'd throw in my 2 cents. :) Many areas have been covered well, and I'll try to avoid those. I hope I have a unique perspective, as I'm likely one of the most certified people on the list, with 15 individual MS certs, MCSE, MCSA, MCDBA, MCSE Messaging, CCNA, CCDA, routing and switching parts of the CCNP, A+, Network+, Server+, Security+, and SSCP. And I may have forgotten something, I don't remember. ;)
I'm involved in a number of open source BSD projects, in writing documentation and administering systems, outlined here if you're interested. http://chrisbuechler.com/index.php?id=27 I'd mainly like to address two areas. One, testing location (I know that's been covered pretty well, but I have some experiences most of you probably don't), and two, so-called "brain dumping". I know VUE and Prometric are being shied away from for cost and other reasons. I agree that this is a good idea. I've taken tests at 6 different VUE and Prometric centers in Louisville KY, Evansville IN, and Jeffersonville IN. The quality of the facilities varies drastically, from a monitoring and compliance with procedures perspective, as well as the quality (or lack thereof) of equipment. Sometimes you're watched on camera, with microphones, and through a window, other times they don't really know or care that you exist, and several situations in between. Some test centers have nice machines with good monitors, some are absolutely horrible. I took one test at a location with a 10+ year old 14" CRT monitor that must have had a dot pitch of .5, and it was dying so it flickered badly and did other nasty eye straining things. On top of that, it was on a desk that would violently shake if you exhaled (and I'm not exaggerating by much). I came out of there with an incredible headache, though still managed to pass the test somehow. By contrast, the SSCP (which is tested alongside the CISSP) was the most comfortable, organized and well proctored of any of the tests I've taken. I definitely think this is the approach to take, though the pencil and fill in the circle answer card was quite retro. :) On the subject of brain dumping (or plagiarism in general). This has been the number one devaluing factor, in my opinion, of certifications in general, especially Microsoft. Cisco and other vendors have suffered the same. If you haven't been playing the certification game and/or been around a lot of people in the game, brain dumps are basically people either memorizing the questions and typing them out upon leaving, or getting them out of the testing center in some other fashion (writing them down, tape recorder, etc.). Then you have sites like mcsebraindumps.com that offer the test questions to anybody and everybody (not just MS, virtually every cert). With thousands of VUE and Prometric testing centers around the world, it's pretty much impossible to eliminate bad ones, and I feel this is the primary contributor to this plagiarism. I could have written down all the questions and walked out with them a few of my 20+ times. The CISSP and SSCP are notably missing for the most part from brain dump sites. Why is anyone's guess. My first thought is far better proctoring. Secondly, maybe the work experience requirement makes these dumps in less demand, though the certifications are clearly in high demand and are highly valued (overly so, in many circumstances, or touted for the wrong reasons or under inappropriate circumstances). Lastly, maybe the code of ethics has something to do with it. Microsoft, Cisco, and all the other big names, with their huge resources, have attempted to get these done away with. They've been successful in some limited circumstances, but overall not very much. Cisco seems to have taken a good approach recently. Their question pool, it seems from the braindumps, has increased from around 150 or so questions several years ago to 600-700 questions, and they appear to be rotating in new questions frequently. I surmise this by what I've seen from browsing various brain dump message boards in the last week or so, compared to what I've seen in years past. Used to be people could pass the CCNA (as an example) on the first or second shot using nothing but brain dumps. Now I see people talking about failing 4-5 times and how many of the test questions weren't on any dumps. Cheers to Cisco for seemingly taking action to alleviate this problem. My point, and I'm going to end this novel now, is we need to do everything we can from the start to keep this from becoming a problem. If the deep pockets of Microsoft can't do away with this after the fact, we certainly can't. If anybody's still reading this, Scott Ullrich (DragonFly and FreeSBIE committer, amongst other BSD projects) and I are making the trip up to BSDCan from Louisville KY USA. Hope to meet many of you there! Regards, -Chris disclaimer: I'm truly an honest test taker that hasn't used brain dumps, my knowledge of the area comes from curiousity and those around me that aren't so virtuous. _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
