Braindumps

apr911

networker050184 wrote: »

Of course no one is 100% honest all the time, I'm not that nieve. Someone who cheats their way to their qualifications and then lies about it in order to further their carrer isn't trustworthy IMO. Talk about how hard it is and the tests are unfair all you want, but the bottom line is I don't want liers and cheaters working for me and I doubt anyone else really does thats worth working for.

Before I offer a final rebuttal, let me try and understand what you're saying as it appears you're treating lying and cheating as one in the same. So let me ask this, if faced with the choice between hiring someone who walked in the door and said in their inteview "I braindumped my exams" and hiring someone who you knew lied on their resume, walked into the interview and continued that lie...

Lets assume that both candidates completely nailed all portions of the interview. Lets also assume this is an extreme example and a real life situation is going to be much more subtle so not hiring either one is not an option you must hire one of them. Which do you hire?

Because these are decisions hiring manager's face everyday. So what to you is the lesser of the 2 evils? Someone who lies about their history or someone who tells the truth but cheats his way through.

Turgon

networker050184 wrote: »

Of course no one is 100% honest all the time, I'm not that nieve. Someone who cheats their way to their qualifications and then lies about it in order to further their carrer isn't trustworthy IMO. Talk about how hard it is and the tests are unfair all you want, but the bottom line is I don't want liers and cheaters working for me and I doubt anyone else really does thats worth working for.

What do you call a lier and cheater though? Someone who uses a ****? You have to be careful here. When I worked at the largest ISP in the country I had opposite me a guy who was a CCIE who looked after the core. He could configure things on the fly and boldly told me he can out configure anyone he knew. I never met anyone who said Phil couldn't. He dumped the written exam to recertify his CCIE and thought I was plain mad going about it the good old fashioned way saying I was throwing my money away going after it ligit. On the one hand he was right, I did fail it and required several attempts to clear, at the same time he breezed his test telling people in the office that the test prep he obtained was 'very accurate'. On the other hand, I contest he was wrong because I passed on merit so to speak. His view was, he had passed the lab, and to be fair I had not. He has since gone on to seriously well paid things as a director of operations for numerous companies and certainly knows his stuff and can handle things. By your logic he's a liar and a cheater, well ok then, but I know I could depend on him in a complex or crisis situation.

Things are not always cut and dried. Do I condone what he did? Nope. Is he a great networker? Yes.

joneno

apr911 wrote: »

+1 to all 3 of these points. I too have known people that studied, crammed or did whatever short of using a brain **** to pass the test and yet they couldnt answer simple questions to save their life. Meanwhile, Ive known some who have brain dumped and can explain a technology inside and out.

Most of the people I know who have brain dumped were brain dumping exams to upgrade (MCSE->MCITP:EA) or renew (CCNP, CCIE, etc) their certs. They already have the requisite knowledge they just dont have time to game the exam.

And lets be honest, thats all anyone ever does... Game the exam. I have yet to sit a technical certification where I was presented a real world scenario with a real world solution. Every vendor has a bias towards their own solution and the way the technology is supposed to work (according to the standard or the vendor) is rarely the way it actually does.

For example,

You can clear both phases of a vpn tunnel on a Cisco ASA using the command "clear crypto isakmp sa PeerAddress"

It works, it will tear down both phases of the tunnel but it shouldnt work. According to the RFC's for VPN tunnels, phase 2 of a tunnel should be able to survive the teardown of phase 1 however, the way Cisco implements the tunnel on the ASA, tearing down phase 1 causes phase 2 to be torn down too...


The blurring of the line between vendor technologies also pushes people to use brain ****. Take for example the MCITP Server Administrator exam 70-646. To reach the MCITP SA level, there is no OS exam required and the exam itself is titled "SERVER ADMINISTRATOR." Yet, when I took my 70-646 exam, there was questions about administering Windows 7 technologies. Granted, the questions were in relation to how you enable interoperability between different technologies. However, if I had only studied Server 2008, I had very little desktop or Win7 experience and I hadnt taken enough certifications to know how to reasonably deduce an answer I didnt know, I wouldnt have had a clue on the answer.

Cisco also has this problem. When I started studying for my CCNP:security, I was going to take the SECURE exam first because the exam description by Cisco makes it sound like a more advanced form of the IINS CCNA:security exam. I ended up taking 2 months off by which point I was more into Firewalls and VPNs than routing and switching so I opted to do FIREWALL and VPN first as the knowledge was fresher. Im glad I did as SECURE turned out to be a hodge-podge of questions relating to FIREWALL, VPN, IDS and IINS and if I had taken the exam first and managed to pass (something which I doubt greatly), I doubt it would have been with as high of a score as I managed to achieve.

In the end, forgoing the legal entanglements and the ethics questions of using something you know to be illegal, cheating, whatever, I think it ultimately it comes down to how you use the brain ****. If you use the **** just to pass the exam and get the cert are you any better for it? No. On the other hand, if you use the **** to study and learn that which you dont understand is it that much different from using other study practice exams?

The value of braindumps all depends on how they are used and using them as a straight up **** I dont think is effective. While I have never used a braindump in preparation for an exam, I did recently download and run through the Cisco SECURE exam after I had passed with a score in the 900's. I went through the questions and a good 30-40% of the "answers" were different than how I answered the question yet I still got a mid-to-high 900 score.

Would I have passed if I had studied just the brain ****? almost certainly no. On the other hand, if I used the brain ****, ignored the selected "answers" and researched each question on my own, I would have passed and probably learned quite a bit in the process. And by research I mean actually find the vendor documentation for the technology and where the answer to the question is answered in it.

I have found, at least for cisco, the questions are lifted straight from the documentation or cisco press book, granted you dont know which statements or facts might appear on the exam but if you read the book or the documentation, you have seen every question on the exam even if you dont know it.

I don't know you and I cant pass judgement on your personality. You sound like a politician right now, I think you should switch career, for real. being diplomatic and all that. What is wrong is wrong. There is no way anyone could talk themselves from knowingly or unknowingly using **** to pass a test, and come to a blog to justify it. When in doubt, do what is morally sanctioned. Using **** as a means to an end is just taking advantage of the system. Is it your fault that there are **** out there? Nope! But it is your fault that you seek them and use them to pass a test? Yup! I've cheated on a tests in college and I know our bad I feel about it. Their is always a joy of accomplishment, when you sincerely work hard to pass a test.

Bl8ckr0uter

joneno wrote: »

I don't know you and I cant pass judgement on your pesonality. You sound like a politician right now, I think you should switch fcareer, for real. being diplomatic and all that. What is wrong is wrong. There is no way anyone could talk themselves from knowingly or unknowingly using **** to pass a test, and come to a blog to justify it. When in doubt, do what is morally sanctioned. Using **** as a means to an end is just taking advantage of the system. Is it your fault that their are **** out there? Nope! But it is your fault that you seek them and use them to pass a test. I've cheated on a tests in college and I know our bad I feel about it. Their is always a joy of accomplishment, when you sincerely work hard to pass a test.

The funny thing about morals is that we all have our own set....

Turgon

apr911 wrote: »

When work starts pressing to have X cert by Y date, whats a person to do really? Or when you suddenly find yourself or a significant other without a job and you still need to provide for your family but to get a new job or to get the promotion with greater pay, you need to get certified because the business requires it, what are you going to do?

Life is a balancing act of priorities. Food on the table is number 1 and if putting food on the table is threatened because I dont have a certification and if I dont get the certification by a date where I couldnt reasonably study for the exam, you better believe that my priorities are going to shift, my current personal convictions and any other objections I may have against brain dumping are going straight out the window.

I confess I felt differently about things some years back, but I came to realise this was a utopian attitude and unrealistic.

First of all, there are many companies that require their employees to get certified and a rat race evolves in the workplace. It's all very well being *pure* but if that means you study your ass off for a year at great personal cost to yourself as it's on private time when you should be resting before another day in the pressure cooker at work and then you fail, when hordes of people in the office are clattering out multiple certs in short order and being rewarded for it financially then you have an issue while you continue to work for that company. Managers want results not morality. If the whole department dumping tests means the manager hits his targets and has a great pie chart at head office and gets his bonus, he's inclined not to care how you got there.

Secondly, going by the statistics and using the CCIE as an example, most people passing this exam are not from the west these days but from emerging economies or developing countries where a great deal of IT is being outsourced to. The poverty trap here is very real and these people simply dont have the income to spend on expensive training materials or multiple attempts at the exam. They cannot afford to fail an expensive test so they ****. I have seen threads on newsgroups where one Indian guy took a loan out to pay for his CCIE training requirements and he was ready to blow his brains out if he didn't pass and land that job that would pull him up to a salary level that would enable him to repay his debts because the people he borrowed from would come calling and he wanted to protect his family. It happens.

It is no surprise that people will short circuit process and expense to pass exams.

Now, Im not saying any of this good, but there is a matter of realpolitik in life.

joneno

Bl8ckr0uter wrote: »

The funny thing about morals is that we all have our own set....

You are 100% correct, but we owe humanity a duty to live a virtuous and moral life.

Bl8ckr0uter

joneno wrote: »

You are 100% correct, but we owe humanity a duty to live a virtuous and moral life.

So let me ask you something? Do you torrent anything (training related or not)?


Virtues and morals are very relative to the person. My set of values probably isn't the same as yours.