Certifications: Pass or Fail?

I’ve never been a fan of vendor-controlled certifications, such as the Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) or MCSE, for a number of reasons. Vendor-controlled certifications have always been troublesome. First and most heinous is these certifications' strong marketing aspect. Remember Microsoft's threat a few years ago to decertify Windows NT 4.0 MCSEs? Microsoft knew that people would replace NT 4.0 servers slowly—the price Redmond paid for having created a fairly good product in NT 4.0, I guess—and hoped to use certification to change that. Only letting people call themselves “certified” if they'd passed the test for the latest, but not most heavily used, server version would have created legions of “experts” who were actually inadvertent salespeople. (“Why are you using that old NT? I learned in MCSE class the 20 reasons why you’ve got to upgrade!”) Second is the tests' format: multiple choice. To create tests that can be administered and graded quickly and automatically, Microsoft provides simplistic answers that are either right or wrong—at least in the vendor's eyes. . . .