Just registered, hope I'm not too late.

Gregory Childers said:

I agree that the 8570/8104 was poorly implemented. There should be exemptions for people in non-technical positions.

That being said, I can't condone cheating. It devalues the certification for everyone who put forth the hard work and honest effort to pass.

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On that, we agree.

I've mentioned a story before where a colleague was talking smack because he had the CASP+ and I didn't. Well, eventually, I worked up and got there. He had to retake his and...well...he didn't do so well. Then I found out he was another braindump chump - where I busted my tail to get mine. Walked out of the test center with a throbbing headache but I had passed.

Suffices to say, kids, don't be a chump. Pass the cert right and the throbbing headache will be worth every bit - at least until you get home and pop a couple Excedrin.

jasoneckert said:

Had a dusty old voucher lying around from the last TTT — figured I should probably use it before it expired and turned into digital compost.

This exam actually had a suspicious number of networking questions on it...

Props to the TTT session for giving me just enough of a guilt trip to schedule it.
Now back to pretending subnetting is fun in front of students.

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Teach them Magic Number subnetting and be their hero

I agree that the 8570/8104 was poorly implemented. There should be exemptions for people in non-technical positions.

That being said, I can't condone cheating. It devalues the certification for everyone who put forth the hard work and honest effort to pass.

Congratulations

Gregory Childers said:

When the A+/Net+/Sec+ trifecta were transitioning from "good for life" certifications to CE certifications, I was teaching a lot of CompTIA classes on military bases.

At one particular base, I was teaching Sec+. The class was engaged. They were asking pertinent questions.

At the end of class, their commanding officer handed each one of them a set of burned CDs with the name of a well-known brain dump written in Sharpie on the surface. He told them to memorize the questions and answers and that they would be fine.

I was extremely angry that they were so brazen about cheating. I reported them, even with the risk of losing future work.

There is no place in our industry for cheaters.

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This happened at our college as well. My daughter was handed a DVD with a bunch of VCE files on it. She asked me about it - I told her to shred the thing and summarily put a stop to the practice.

I'm know people out there still rely on VCEs to cheat the system.

Part of the problem within the DoD (I guess it's DoW, now?) is the pressure that military members as well as civilian contractors have to pass according to DoD 8570/8740 standards. I distinctly remember two stories where people where required to have Sec+ but were not in jobs even requiring that kind of knowledge (two ladies who did desk phones, one fellow who did surveillance cameras). They all lost their jobs because they could not get the cert in the very short timeframe. This puts a lot of pressure on people to pass an exam, knowledge of which they would not need to do their job effectively, just to keep their job.

I presented this problem directly to Todd Thibodeaux a couple years ago. While he said that CompTIA was working with the DoD to sort it, it was really 'their' problem. He was right, but that doesn't help matters with those that lost their jobs.

It doesn't justify cheating, but it does explain the motivation.

/r