Braindumps (was Re: [lpi-discuss] how about LPIC-2 ?)

[Evan Leibovitch]

I'm actually surprised to hear of instances where people even mention 
using a braindump to an instructor; heck, I'm surprised to know that 
people who buy braindumps are even in class. In the instances I've heard 
of people using dumps, they were considered shortcuts which bypassed the 
need for conventional training rather than augmented it.

It's important to note that there is a situation of relative ethics 
going on here, and embarrassment is not necessarily a useful punishment 
for someone who sees braindumps as a matter of "playing the game" rather 
than cheating. This is especially true in some Asian countries, where 
certification is not seen as a demonstration of anything beyond your 
ability to obtain it, but it's certainly not exclusive to that region. 
In these cases the onus is on the certification body to protect the 
value of the cert, but don't expect much co-operation or sympathy from 
the candidates who use dumps.

What is most ironic to me is that very few "genuine" brain dumps really 
are. Many are just bunches of sample questions or dumps of old exams. 
(If you thought you were buying a real current brain dump but didn't get 
that, who are you going to complain to?) Unfortunately, dumps that are 
genuine (verified by exam takers) spread quicker than new Linux ISOs.

I think that Sandy once said that if there was a critical mass of 
somewhere just above 3,000 items that were regularly rotated, dumps 
wouldn't be worthwhile. VUE and Prometric have the ability to create 
exams on the fly picking items from the pool (of course keeping minimum 
numbers of items per subject), but that costs a little money and of 
course you need that big pool of items. The thinking is that someone 
prepared to do (and capable of) memorization of many thousands of items, 
probably *does* have at least a minimal grasp of the subject matter :-).

- Evan