BHL wrote: > I'd probably hope that it can be discussed by other people to add > a hands on portion.
This idea has been around, and proposed, and debated, for about as long as LPI exams exist. The main advantage of a hands-on exam is that it gives people a warm fuzzy feeling that candidates who do well in it “really know their stuff”. In reality it is not at all clear that a hands-on exam provides information about the capabilities of a candidate that the current written LPI exams don't, or if it did, whether whatever information it provides is worth the considerable extra hassle (and cost) we'd incur not just with administering the exam fairly and accessibly, but also with designing the questions/tasks in the first place. For starters, remember that LPI exams are supposed to be vendor-neutral but a hands-on exam by its very nature isn't (Red Hat has a distinct advantage there because all they need to test is how well people can cope with RHEL). You would have to decree that hands-on exams can happen on any one of a handful of officially-eligible Linux distributions (at the candidate's discretion? at the examiner's discretion?), and it'd be likely that the LPI exams would end up as inofficial CentOS or Ubuntu exams simply because these might be the distributions that are used for the hands-on tests. That's not what we want. Also, for practical reasons the number of scenarios that come up in hands-on testing is probably going to be fairly limited. It is reasonable to assume that these scenarios will be just as amenable to “brain dumping” as the written exams are, and that people will merly train themselves to perform a number of steps by rote that will accomplish whatever the ten exam scenarios call for. We can of course try to cycle the scenarios like we do now with the exam questions, but the scenarios are a lot more difficult to prepare than the questions and that means that they will probably stick around longer simply because the people who are qualified to come up with them, translate them, etc. are limited in the time at their disposal. In effect, chances are that such an exam will not provide the hoped-for insight into how a candidate deals with an unfamiliar situation because the situations they encounter on the exam are not unfamiliar, and at that point the value proposition of a hands-on exam breaks down. Finally, the current LPI exams are dirt-cheap, as professional certification exams go, but in many places the exam fee is still a fairly sizable chunk of one's budget. How much do we get to charge for hands-on testing before they are priced out of reach of candidates in less affluent countries? Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau · [email protected] · https://www.tuxcademy.org Freie Schulungsmaterialien für Linux und Open-Source-Software Free Training Materials for Linux and Open-Source Software _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] https://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
