Titus Pullo
I came, I saw, I slept
join:2004-06-26
 ·Embarq
| said by inteller  :i'd rather somone bring me a log book of all of their service calls (successfully completed) rather than a list of certs that any good test taker who crammed overnight could pass. I agree. Years back, I took a Network+ course at a community college. The course was test-centric in that the curriculum and labs (a joke, the latter) were geared towards passing the exam in 16 weeks. Granted, most everyone who took the test passed, but that was only a handful of people due to the fact that the class was part of the IT curriculum at the college, and that was divvied up into programming, applications and networking. The first two groups only wanted to pass the class and didn't appear to care much about learning anything real-world applicable.
I ended up the 'leader' of my lab group due to the fact that I had a home LAN and ran Linux on my notebook at the time (big whoop, I realize). Long to short, ten weeks into the course the lab assignment was to create specific user accounts on a w2k server for the purpose of troubleshooting steps. The two computers (w2k server & w2k workstation) had been futzed with beforehand and were not communicating.
I asked my 'group' what first? Silence. After finding the cable between the computers was not a crossover, I said "what next?" silence. I had to create the network (subnet, etc) while my 'group' sat by and watched in amazement. I then watched in utter disgust as they fumbled through the lab book step by step, skipping a process at the first sign of trouble and moving on to the next, which, of course, on more than one occasion couldn't be completed due to the previous step being uncompleted. And on it went. I couldn't believe it.
That was the first lab where I was actually more hands off because I realized that I was doing practically everything up to that point and thought maybe one guy was getting pissed. His demeanor changed completely when I sat there while they had their thumbs planted firmly up their backsides while trying to create, mangle, and then repair accounts on the client/server.
One of my group passed the CompTia test at the end of the course by cramming the practice tests the class took. It's a joke. Period. One in ten 'cert- masters' are truly interested and qualified to call themselves technicians in any tech field today.
--
A monthly desktop thread should only happen when Paris Hilton buys a computer. |
