On Wednesday 14 June 2006 15:53, Stewart Watkiss wrote: > My biggest gripe with the current LPIC exams is that they are > purely a measure of memory recall. Whether that particular option > is -R or -r does not measure the ability of someone to manage a > linux computer.
This gripe is very common, and to some extent it is valid. As mentioned in the FAQs at www.lpi.org a few such questions are good and give valuable insight into a candidate's knowledge - if someone wants to score 96+%, then he is going to have to work for it and have vast knowledge of everything. I suspect most such items in the exam pool are old ones - I've done a number of item writing workshops and each time I've been specifically asked to not play the memorize the man pages game. The item writers themselves were very happy to hear this and set about writing excellent items that require you to really think about it. It'll take time to build up a good item pool, as old questions can only be retired if there are new ones to take their place. And this is an OSS exam anyway, so the best solution is for you to come up with questions yourself and submit them to LPI. Just remember to adhere to the security guidelines :-) > This is not a direct criticism of the LPIC program as many other > schemes also use a similar method. An exam should test the ability > to apply knowledge to accomplish the objects. I think that it would > be better to give access to a limited number of man pages (and > perhaps HowTo), in the form of a printed book for the paperbased > exams, and then test that the candidate understands the tasks and > where to find the information, rather than requiring that the > candidate remember some obscure command options. This is an interesting idea, but will require that the existing exams be remade in their entirety. It might work for L3 though as that is new. -- If only me, you and dead people understand hex, how many people understand hex? Alan McKinnon alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za +27 82, double three seven, one nine three five _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
