> sorry, was unclear. robert proposed a meta-certification body
> which then
> gave the tests out to certifiers (netthink, iterative etc).
> this seems to
> me to be far too complicated and fragmented.
There are three main roles to this as I see it, and it's not obvious to me
that they should all be done by the same body.
1. Administration of the tests. Just the operational hassle of testing
people, scoring them, logging results, sending certificates out etc.
2. Creation of the tests. Deciding what the different exams are, how hard
they are, what questions in them each year (quarter?), etc.
3. Marketing. Creating awareness of the certification, encouraging employees
to take the certification, making employers aware of it, encouraging
organisations to help with number 1 above.
Of all of these 1 is the hardest. IMO web based tests are inadequate. It's
too easy to cheat, from having the book in front of you, to having your mate
next to you, to doing it under 15 different names and seeing which one does
best. I'm not discounting a purely web based test, but I'm not convinced.
This means, you need to sit people down in exam like conditions of some
sort, where you can enforce at least time limit, that the person doing the
test is the one getting the certificate, and that they don't phone a friend
etc.
I think the only way of making this feasible, then, is to distribute it
across any company willing to participate. All it needs is for a company to
set a meeting room aside for a day, and provide a volunteer to administer
the test. We should be able to get corporates to do this in exchange for the
publicity and goodwill, and a small admin fee payed by each candidate
(fiver?).
Part of the role of the people doing task 2 will be to ensure that the tests
can be easily administered in this way.
Comments?
