Father-son duo helped techies ‘hack exams’, earn top scores for big payday
I'm a US military officer working in an IT career field, and we're all required to maintain some of these certifications. As in we literally can't have a privileged account to touch our own LAN unless a third-party entity like CompTIA, (ISC)2, ISACA, Cisco, or SANS deems us fit.The whole ecosystem and culture around this is just ridiculous. Despite entering this career field with undergraduate and graduate degrees in CS from serious universities, the first (and only) question that people asked me was, "what certs do you have?" People go around talking about which "cert" they want next, and which ones are the hardest to get. People list all their "certs" in their email signatures after their name. People really measure their worth, and the worth of others, by these things.So I've played the game by reading the exam guides and taking the tests (the military pays the $300-$1,500 testing fees for us in most cases, at least) and got "my certs." Now I'm a CISSP, CISM, CEH, and CCNA. The content of the exams isn't all bad; it's certainly different from academic CS and more applicable to managing IT. But these are just multiple-choice tests that one can easily pass with superficial knowledge obtained from a 100-page exam guide. Someone asked if CISSP was the hardest test I've ever taken... no... my final exams for Theory of Computation and Advanced Algorithms were...Anyway, I've come to find out that most people don't even read the exam guides to learn what little material they contain. The typical approach, apparently, is to acquire a "dump," which is the bank of actual questions, and then repeatedly take "practice exams" so that they've already seen (and memorized) all of the questions that they might encounter during the actual exam. So, blatant cheating. I think this is very well known throughout the military IT community, and probably among the certification vendors too, but everyone turns a blind eye to it. If we stopped it, then most of our staff wouldn't be allowed to work on the LAN (see above), and then how would we get anything done? If the certification vendors stopped it, then the money would dry up as fewer people would take their exams.