LPI exams - Ubuntu Certification

[Daniel Carrera]

On Wed, 2006-05-07 at 14:41 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> You can relax, every "sample exam" out there (bar one) is seriously
> broken and has very little relevance to the real exam.

Ok, but then why are they linked to from the LPI website? And how is one
supposed to know when one is ready if the samples are broken? That
actually makes me nervous in a different way.

> None of them are psychometrically valid,

Could you explain what psychometrically valid means, and how you decide
that a question is valid?

> The exception is the samples at praxis.de which are actually quite good

Could you give me a link to those? Do they have any in English?

> ISA has been dropped from the LPI Objectives, and replaced with 
> PCI/SATA/USB in more detail than it was before.

Good... but here's an example where the practise exam makes you study
for the wrong thing.

> You've just made a classic flaw :-) Such hardware is indeed obsolete if you want
> to buy a machine today. But they hang around for years after the vendors stop 
> selling them, and admins need to know how the hardware works.

No, I didn't. You just missed the point. I was comparing the age of the
hardware with the software. If we're going to test for knowledge of
hardware that is old enough to have an ISA card then we should test for
the software that such hardware may be running which includes at least
one distribution using the 2.2 kernel. If we're going to test for 7
year-old hardware, then we should consider the possibility of a 1.5
year-old Linux distribution (Debian Woody, using the 2.2 kernel). The
end result is that there is no answer for this question because it
depends on what kernel you are running.

I think I've shown that I understand the issue with ISA cards better
than my answer to that sample question is likely to indicate.


> So two, maybe three such questions are a good thing. 10 of them would be bad.

How many questions in the exam?

> > In some questions the exam seems to be measuring the wrong things.
> 
> Seems more like the sample exams are deeply flawed :-)

That is bot comforting and unsettling at the same time.


> If you find some error in the actual exam you write, there is a feedback 
> section at the end where you can enter your comments and improve it for the next 
> candidate.

If that happens, and I show that I know what I'm talking about in my
comment, will I get the point for that question?


> Do keep in mind that there is no known method to measure what we techies would like
> an exam to measure. We want to know if someone knows Linux well, but you can't measure
> that - it's intangible and exists only in your mind. So instead all exams measure some 
> measurable side-effect and rely on that to correlate to the real thing. 

A problem with this type of exam in general is that it's not going to
measure my ability to solve a real-life problem. For example, it doesn't
matter if I know the -name flag for 'find'; I can get a similar result
piping through grep. Any given problem has multiple valid solutions.
Sadly, only direct observation can show his sort of knowledge.

Cheers,
Daniel.
-- 
http://opendocumentfellowship.org
  "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
  unreasonable man tries to adapt the world to himself.
  Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable men."
        -- George Bernard Shaw
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