And while I do see some of us having commented on that thread, not one of us (and I include myself here) congratulated that person for doing it the right way, pointing out that this is a right way to do it, and encouraging others to use this as an example of how they can earn the cert the right way.
It's been a while, myself, since I was on that particular Reddit channel, mostly because it's more of a time sink - and if I want to spend a few minutes writing something, I'd rather do it here on CIN than out there in Reddit land. That being said, I have done this, myself - celebrated the wins of those who did it right, and while I do agree that positive reinforcement will have an effect on a few, I think we do see a continued trend of candidates who would rather do whatever is minimally necessary to get the credential - the ones we earned with hard work.
With respect to vouchers, well, while I get all of my testing paid for, either through comp vouchers here at CompTIA for being a TTT addict, or through my company, I do understand the anger that some have that they had to pay full price when others got them by scamming the system.
Case in point, I called out a poster here on CIN last year for attempting to acquire a voucher by super-speeding or hacking On24 to get credit for completing the TTT sessions. That person never responded and hasn't since my calling him/her out for attempting to scam CompTIA for a comp'ed voucher. Stephen and I spoke about this a few times, about how CompTIA is working internally on the voucher misuse/abuse, since there is a financial impact to CompTIA and labor impact to Stephen and company to have to process vouchers for these folks. After all, I think the TTT program is an amazing resource for those of us who need/want to maintain our cert status.
Another case in point is being asked, point blank, to pirate materials that I've gotten from CIN. Getting the PDF of a textbook has a lot of value and is perpetual. Meanwhile, the person who asked me knew he was asking me to break the rules. I politely told him 'no'. He "understood", meanwhile he and I both knew he was trying to get something for which he was not entitled.
Perhaps the furthest I can go here is to basically say, "who gives a flying flip what others do - it doesn't impact what I do. As long as I'm doing it the right way, if they want to cheat, that's on them." Maybe it's easier to stick my head in the sand and just focus elsewhere. But if we're not interested in holding the line on this, either through positive reinforcement or using a bit of negativity, the point is, we have to see the value in certification *first*, before our students will follow suit. Otherwise, I think we're, at heart, being disingenuous.
/r
