From owner-freebsd-advocacy Mon Jul 12 19:24:22 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Received: from hostigos.otherwhen.com (dialin2017.pernet.net [205.229.2.17]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D34A61506C for ; Mon, 12 Jul 1999 19:24:14 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mavery@mail.otherwhen.com) Received: from mail.otherwhen.com (mail.2.229.205.in-addr.arpa [205.229.2.19] (may be forged)) by hostigos.otherwhen.com (8.8.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id VAA23721; Mon, 12 Jul 1999 21:27:36 -0500 (CDT) Message-Id: <199907130227.VAA23721@hostigos.otherwhen.com> Received: from PORKY/SpoolDir by mail.otherwhen.com (Mercury 1.45); 12 Jul 99 21:24:01 -0600 Received: from SpoolDir by PORKY (Mercury 1.45); 12 Jul 99 21:23:33 -0600 From: "Mike Avery" To: Jonathan Lemon , advocacy@freebsd.org Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 21:23:24 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: FreeBSD Certification...again Reply-To: mavery@mail.otherwhen.com In-reply-to: <199907130150.UAA08668@free.pcs> References: X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.12) Sender: owner-freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 12 Jul 99, at 20:50, Jonathan Lemon wrote: >On 13 Jul 99, at 8:32, Sue Blake wrote: >> On Mon, Jul 12, 1999 at 06:01:46PM -0400, Lanny Baron wrote: > > > > It appears you are making a joke of it. FreeBSD could come up > > > > with programs for different areas of proficiency. Each with its > > > > own certification. It may not go far right away, but down > > > > the road, as with most good products, it would succeed. > > > And who will pay for this to be developed? > > It kinda depends.... if all we want is certification, it's cheap > > and easy. If we want it to *MEAN SOMETHING*, then it'll be > > harder. > > Still, the training courses and testing are two different aspects. > > I suspect generating the tests would be fairly easy..... and the > > questions on them can be validated in a few hundred test cycles so > > a short, valid, test could be administered.... > *cough* *cough* > You've never done this before, have you? Well, I used to be a teacher... and I have had experience with generating and validating tests. > Generating and validating the test is the _hard_ part. Calculating > the reliability and validity of the test, using factor analysis to > weed out the useless questions, and insure that scores wind up with > a normal distribution takes a while. > I asked a professional (my wife, actually, :-), and she said that > it would take a minimum of a year to develop a reliable test. The > curriculum is the easy part. Ahhhh.... yeah. It's always easy to say your part is the hard part and the other guys is the easy part. Generating a curriculum is not easy. If it is intended to work, challenge all the students, without putting those at the far ends of the bell curve into a coma. Workshops are easy... courses and curricula are a lot harder. Once a test has been created, determining which questions are discrimators is pretty easy. Determining WHAT they discriminate can be hard. Like I said, if we don't care about validity, it's easy. If we want it to *MEAN SOMETHING* then it gets a lot harder. > As to different areas of proficiency, you're absolutely right. There > wouldn't be "one" test, but different tests based on what skillsets you > were looking for, and what the goal of the test was. > Yes, I was half kicking around the idea of seriously doing this. However, > 1) the test would not be free, and 2) I wonder whether there really is a > market for this or not. It's a chicken or the egg problem. Has FreeBSD reached a critical mass where it seems to matter to employers whether or not people are certified for FreeBSD? What differences would you expect to see in a FreeBSD certified person and a Certified Unix Admin? (Sorry, can't remember the names of the group that handles that certification right now....) Mike ====================================================================== Mike Avery MAvery@mail.otherwhen.com (409)-842-2942 (work) ICQ: 16241692 * Spam is for lusers who can't get business any other way * A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day: A bad joke is a parody error... To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message