"George R." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > We all have our general conceptions about the ultimate 'product', and > one recurring theme in my mind is that the exam taker should have > access to the man pages. . . as *that* is how the vast majority of > sysadmins do things out of their routine and beyond their knowledge. > And clearly, knowing how to use the man pages is fundamental to being > a sysadmin.
I'm not so sure. LPI has a lot of experience with this, and they claim that success at memorizing command line options is a good indicator of actual skill (i.e. people who can remember them generally do well in all parts of the LPI exam, and people who can't don't), and that they are a good way of weeding out crammers and cheats, because there are so many tools and so many options that the only way to learn enough of them to pass is through experience. The LPI exam is completely automated; all questions are either multiple choice, or open questions which have only one correct answer. Each student is presented with a randomized exam sprinkled with candidate questions, which do not count towards the student's final score. Scores for candidate questions are compiled and analysed to determine how strongly correlated they are with overall scores; this helps make sure that new questions do not change the exam's bias or difficulty. New questions are introduced continuously, both to keep the exam up-to-date with modern technology and to curb cheating. LPI exams, like practically every other IT certification exam out there, are administered at Pearson VUE and Thomson Prometric testing centres. If you want your hypothetical BSD certification program to fly, you will have to use them too. It is the only way to make the exam available throughout the world at low cost and guarantee a level playing field. (Disclaimer: my employer offers training for the LPI exam and several other certification exams, including Novell, SuSE and Apple, but I am not myself involved in training or certification.) DES -- Dag-Erling Sm�rgrav - [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ BSDCert mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nycbug.org/mailman/listinfo/bsdcert
