HI all,
I'm thinking the same question of Anselm, but BJS already replied this
question, how much more security/practice, most expensive is exame, make
it impossible the project/institute LPI.
On 14/04/2019 13:16, Anselm Lingnau wrote:
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
_______________________________________________
lpi-examdev mailing list
[email protected]
https://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
