Date: Mon, 12 Jul 1999 21:23:24 -0500 From: "Mike Avery" <mavery@mail.otherwhen.com> To: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com>, advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD Certification...again Message-ID: <199907130227.VAA23721@hostigos.otherwhen.com> In-Reply-To: <199907130150.UAA08668@free.pcs> References: <local.mail.freebsd-advocacy/199907130029.TAA23612@hostigos.otherwhen.com>
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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
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A Randomly Selected Thought For The Day:
A bad joke is a parody error...
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