The cheating industry that is devaluing IT certification - part two
By Brad Reese on Mon, 04/09/07 - 7:56pm.Welcome back! If you’ve stumbled upon this series and not had the chance to familiarize yourself with Robert Williams or his goals for CertGuard.com, please take a moment to review Part One, (Part Three and Part Four).
 Braindumps
Braindumps are certainly not the worst thing that people can take advantage of when it comes to getting certified, but it is at the top of the list; we’ll get into "hired gunmen" in the last installment of this series. For now, we would like to help you better understand what braindumps are, the repercussions of using braindumps, and how to determine if the material you’re using, or recommending to your students, employees, or clients, violate any of the Exam Security Agreements/Non-Disclosure Agreements (or NDAs, as they are commonly referred) we discussed in the first part of this series. |
In the current vernacular, braindumps don’t seem to have a clear definition, but we are working on one.
Thus far, CertGuard has defined them as being:
"Questions and Answers taken from exams or other tests that have been copyrighted for purposes of protecting Confidential or Trade Secret Information and distributed for purposes of cheating or profit."
Nowadays, braindumps aren’t just provided by some kid that remembered questions from an exam, there are actually companies that profit from illegally acquiring the exams in whole, or in part.
There are many downfalls to using or promoting braindumps that everyone should be aware of.
Braindumps provide a means for unqualified individuals to enter the workforce and under qualified individuals to take the positions of more knowledgeable and more experienced personnel, primarily due to the lower pay rates that most of the lesser qualified personnel are asking for.
Soon after hiring these individuals, many employers realize that the certification holder that was just hired actually has very little knowledge of the topics they claimed to be experts on.
This causes a problem in the workforce, because now you’ve got a dilemma on your hands.
Do you fire the individual and risk spending the money and resources it takes to screen other, better qualified individuals?
Or do you spend money and resources to train the individual properly?
Braindumps, in today’s certification world, have caused problems for not only the companies which hire the cheaters that use the braindumps, but they’ve caused problems for the hard working professionals that have honestly worked their tails off to earn their certifications.
There are ways to avoid hiring these sorts of people, but it usually takes a highy skilled technical recruiter, or an employer with experienced human resource professionals, to pick them out of the crowd.
Not every business, especially small businesses, can afford to have experienced human resource staff that are knowledgeable enough to handle this.
For those of you that own a small business, are hiring managers or would just like to pass this information on, we have a small section in the next installment dedicated to preventing people that cheat from working on your hardware and software.
By now, you’re probably wondering how braindumps have gotten to be so prominent in the IT community.
The largest braindump provider out there, Certification Trendz, is banking millions of (US) dollars every year off of the sale of their braindumps.
They own upwards of 1,000 websites that are all linked together, which provides them with a very large media circle to promote and distribute their ill gotten materials.
Their primary site, TestKing.com (TK), sees nearly twenty-thousand visitors, on a monthly basis, from the United States alone.
How can we as concerned members of the IT community, stop the use of braindumps?
CertGuard’s mission in addition to what was stated in part one of this series, is to effectively reduce or eliminate the use of braindumps in the IT community.
What is done to a candidate that is in violation of an Exam Security Policy?
Recently, many of the certification vendors have changed their stance on the violations of those policies.
It used to be that an individual caught cheating would receive a temporary ban, in other words, a "time-out," but nothing was permanent.
Now, in some cases, if an individual is in violation of the candidate agreement they are permanently blacklisted and all of their certifications, previous certifications included, are stripped.
Our next installment of this series will discuss the thieves that create the braindumps, the cheaters that use them, and how CertGuard is trying to handle them.
Series: Part One
Related article: Would you cheat to get an IT credential?
- About Brad Reese on Cisco
Brad Reese cofounded BradReese.Com Cisco Refurbished, which enables affordable Cisco networks globally by assuring customer satisfaction with guaranteed one year warranties on both Cisco Repair as well as Refurbished Cisco.
Don't be shy, contact Brad Reese online or call him at 646-827-1130.
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