Enough about underinflated footballs; let’s talk about cheating on IT certification exams. Here a contributor to Reddit’s forum devoted to networking laments his personal experience in a post headlined: “Failed my CCNA; coworkers discovered to be cheating to certify.”
So, I work for a small/medium IT company. … I have a degree in my field and am pretty confident in my abilities to perform enterprise-level networking. …
I failed my CCNA, first time I ever took it, 3 months ago. I was crushed. Two of my coworkers with the same job title also failed around the same time. A couple weeks later they re-took it and passed with shockingly high scores, and a month later one of them got his CCDA with almost no studying and finished in 15 minutes. Confused, I asked what he did for study. He sent me a link to two braindumps. I asked my direct supervisor if that was acceptable and he flat-out told me, "Dude it’s what we all do" and sent me 3 PDFs over jabber.
So, now I'm at an extreme loss of morale. I refuse to cave and be a paper CCNA or a paper anything. Unfortunately, these certifications are incentivized. Everyone who certed up in the past 4 months got 10% pay bumps and promotions. My superior is now a guy that routinely asks what VTP is, or how to configure a banner MOTD. …
What am I supposed to do? I don't want to cheat with them, but they laugh about memorizing high-weight answers and just knowing the easy stuff. …
More than 300 comments later, the one that was top-rated pretty much spoke for the group:
What are you supposed to do? Study, pass, and don't be a paper cert.
There will always be people who take the easy path. You don't need to cheat in order to pass, and you can actually learn the material.
As for the guys who did cheat?
The consensus was that they’re sure to be exposed and pay a price at some point down the road, either in a spectacularly failed job interview or under the scornful eye of a legitimately skilled co-worker.
And it seems as though our man was buying it.
“Good advice from everyone ... I guess I'll just focus on me instead of the cheaters.”
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