At 10:34 AM -0400 4/20/02, Lupi, Guy wrote: >I was thinking about something this morning also, in Caslow's book he states >that the CCIE lab is modeled after a graduate school exam, designed to test >the students thought patterns and how well they think on their feet. >Questions that appear to address one issue may be designed to look that way, >when the testers are actually looking for something different. Of course >there are little hints thrown in there I am sure, never taken the lab so I >don't know, but if practice scenarios are any measure the hints are very >subtle. Maybe in a lab scenario it would be interesting to include in the >solution the way to decipher a question or questions, as well as give the >candidate an idea of what other possibly confusing questions they might see >in relation to that particular topic.
I've always been impressed by that observation of Caslow's, although I don't know if that's the actual intention of the lab designers. There are other forms of that sort of thinking, ranging from a physician needing to think of the effect of a drug on other drugs and the patient as a whole, to what fighter pilots call "situational awareness." I wonder if this can be developed in a manner other than just hands-on lab exercises. It certainly is a part of medical education, in the traditional way physicians in training are asked leading questions, and the way physicians communicate with one another. I'll give an example of that in a bit. A way to approach this may be more a test engine presenting "word problems" and asking something subtly different than what CCIE written practice materials do. Those practice tests ask for a solution to the problem. If the problem descriptions perhaps could be made a little more detailed, and the question is asked "what is significant about this problem that would make you choose a particular solution?" as distinct for asking about the problem itself, perhaps followed by a conventional question about the solution. I'll try to create some examples and post them. Bear with me in a medical example that both is obscure, but actually the way physicians communicate -- "doctorspeak" is far more than jargon. Luckily, I do have a substantial medical background, including expert systems that simulate the medical thinking process. A relative had just transferred to a rehabilitation program after diagnostic brain surgery, which still had not revealed exactly what was wrong. As part of the intake process, they had an in-house internist take a detailed history, to complement what the physical therapists and the like would focus on. The internist was a nice guy and was taking a competent history. He noted she had asthma, got some details about its treatment, and went on. She then mentioned some chronic rashes, and he asked "you did say you were asthmatic, right?" At that point, I chipped in and said, "the eosinophil count is normal and there are no urinary casts." He did a doubletake and asked "what do you do for a living?" I answered, but he started addressing me as Dr. Berkowitz. You see, when he heard asthma and rashes in a neurologic patient, I had the background -- the big picture if you will -- to know that the possibility of a syndrome called Churg-Strauss vasculitis might explain things. Churg-Strauss is characterized by three things and possibly a fourth: asthma, skin rashes, and a rise in certain blood cells called eosinophils. It may also cause kidney damage, in a way that usually first shows up when structures called "casts" show up in urinalyis. What I was doing was standard inter-doctor communication -- I saw where he was going, and, rather than saying "Churg-Strauss has been ruled out," knew what he'd be looking for next and gave him the negative laboratory information that ruled it out. (You can find a nice, not too technical description of this sort of interaction in Michael Crichton's book, "Five Patients."). Part of the reason I answered the way I did was I knew, from experience, that when doctors hear a certain phrasing in logic, they almost automatically stop thinking of you as a patient or relative, and begin interacting with you as a colleague. I'll use it deliberately to gain that relationship, but also for its original purpose of conveying specialized information efficiently. Let's take a networking parallel. What if the server people are having application response time problems, and start blaming the network. You are called in by the IT manager, who, we shall assume, is quite network-literate. You do some tests, and turn to the manager and say "the TCP window size for this application do slow start and then grow normally." What _negative_ information have I just conveyed about this being a network or host problem (there are several possible answers, all related)? Message Posted at: http://www.groupstudy.com/form/read.php?f=7&i=42080&t=41955 -------------------------------------------------- FAQ, list archives, and subscription info: http://www.groupstudy.com/list/cisco.html Report misconduct and Nondisclosure violations to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
