The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
From the perspective of the multiple-choice/short answer exams themselves (which includes all Sun exams), I have to agree that the paper is not in itself useful. However, there is a large faction of people who, like myself, believe that the structured learning process which comes from a decent set of (exam) objectives and the compulsion to do that work for an end goal is a good way to learn. I hear from a fair few SCWCD takers in the UK and USA for example, and that's their sole reason for doing the exam---to enhance their knowledge and skills. You will often see me say in the SCWCD forum "what's the point of the paper if you don't know the technology?" in response to some posters who clearly just want the paper for as little work as possible.because most of them are just cram-and-regurgitate exercises that really only demonstrate how good your short-term memory is, not your comprehension or ability to use the information.
Again, not fair really. Exams aren't supposed to be about "vomiting obscure facts" and if you look at the new LPIC objectives, they are extremely well structured and far from obscure. They cover a very wide range of essential topics in some good detail: BIOS and basic hardware compatibility, booting with GRUB and LILO and their installation, SysV (touching on Initng and Upstart), using the Bash shell, scripting, useful command line utilities, the filesystem, processes, networking, X, basic security, accessibility... These are all basic things the user and/or administrator should know. The LPIC-2 moves onto common server tasks like Web and mail servers, SSH etc.One of these is the the RHCE. I respect this one because - unless I'm misinformed - half the exam consists of taking a dead box and transforming it into a functional system, rather than simply vomiting obscure facts.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.
SCJP 1.4, SCWCD 1.4 - Hints for you, Certified Scrum Master
Did a rm -R / to find out that I lost my entire Linux installation!
Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs. |