braindumps and whatnot
Hi, here is the recording link from last week's anti-piracy, anti-cheat meeting with Peggy Crowley.
Comments
Anonymous
June 30, 2008
Thank you Ma'am. I missed you during the second session. Now get back to work. btw, the beer is chillin'.Anonymous
June 30, 2008
Thnx Trika! I wasn't able to join the session. I've didn't had the time (getting married this summer, my gf is moving in, studying,etc.etc).. :( Isn't the session available as a podcast? :)Anonymous
July 01, 2008
In this Live Meeting event Peggy talked about what and how MS is trying to stop Exam cheaters and whatAnonymous
July 01, 2008
In this Live Meeting event Peggy talked about what and how MS is trying to stop Exam cheaters and whatAnonymous
July 01, 2008
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July 01, 2008
Meanwhile, I'm wondering why I can't remember how to add a link... :-(Anonymous
July 01, 2008
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July 01, 2008
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July 01, 2008
Trika thanks for the link.. I was really not happy when I realized I missed the Live Meeting. Now I feel better... (Note to self: get Doc to test me for OCD.) Your the best!Anonymous
July 02, 2008
Trika: In the new exams, the Preparation Guides have a lot of lines stating "May include, but is not limited to ...." Would it or would it not be wrong to state that one of the things not mentioned on the prep guide but on the exam is .... ? What about "There were x questions on topics not mentioned explicitly in the preparation guide."? It would be nice if the guides didn't have the "is not limited to" part. It makes it harder to study. P.S. Do you know where I can find some braindumps for that new MCITP: United States History Major? I am afraid to ask Thomas C. Tips, as he may be busy doing other stuff. :-)Anonymous
July 02, 2008
Hey Cuz! Just Googled you. It was sort of hard to pick you out among the thousands of "Trika Harms zum Spreckels" out there... anyway, BOO! [[disappears again into the ethernet]]Anonymous
July 02, 2008
I got the email earlier as if to mock me for missing the live session. :) It seems every time I schedule time to see a session live something comes up....This time it was a SharePoint Server issue... Will take a look at the recording tonight, thanks for the reminder. ;)Anonymous
July 02, 2008
No, not drunk... haven't been since the day I, well, that's not important now... but I've forgotten the syntax... I guess that's not important either... I was just happy that the technology has finally caught up with the cheaters...Anonymous
July 02, 2008
This is what I meant: [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us]AYB[/url]... Forgot about the BBCode... must be getting ready for AARP...Anonymous
July 02, 2008
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July 02, 2008
Must say I kinda agree with Shawn - I took 70-299 a few weeks back and got everything right, which might look dodgy statistically. Ok so maybe the "Yeah but I didn't get 100% on the last 15-20 so maybe it's statistically likely for me to get that in 5% of exams" would clear me, but relying solely on statistics is going to produce false positives. Almost guaranteed. That said "braindumpers" need to be combated somehow...Anonymous
July 02, 2008
On all my exames, I only had once a 100%, and that exam I felt it was a waste of money doing that exam. I found it to easy, there where only 2 questions where I was in doubt between 2 answers. Anyway. I think there is a possibility. If you do an 50 questions exam in 25 minutes, and have a score of 100%, You may seriously doubt the result. That are 2 questions/answers a minut. If you have a lot of text in the questions/answers, then that would be inpossible to read the whole questions and the answers.Anonymous
July 02, 2008
Thanks for the link to the recording. I was surprised to hear that new tests are on braindump sites within a day after publishing them. How's that possible without someone from MSL or one of their vendors leaking the tests? Maybe I'm naive but shouldn't it be the most easy thing to dry out this source of leaks? What I still don't like about the dump site thingy is that although some of us are giving hints about them to Microsoft for ages nothing happens. E.g. certbase.de should be closed down real soon now (tm) because they obviously have verbatim copies of test questions and answers for a lot of MS exams. Especially the 70-620 is frightening. Any German who took this test should be asked to retake it with a whole new batch of possible questions that are not stored at certbase.de just to see if they are masters of memorization or if they really know Vista.Anonymous
July 03, 2008
I guess I'll have to watch the show and see what's up, but I can say that using statistics to spot braindumpers probably isn't as far-fetched as you think it is. I've heard of people going to bootcamps where all they do is study braindumps for two weeks, and then take the exam when they feel like they've memorized it well enough. For example, let's say that Microsoft sees a newly certified MCSE who lives in Virginia but took all 7 exams at a test center in Atlanta in the span of a week and a half. Let's say that the MCSE in question had perfect scores on 5 of the 7 exams, and 970+ scores on the other two. Would you suspect them of using braindumps? What if there were 12 other newly certified MCSEs who took the exact same 7 exams during the same period at the same location and had similar results? Are you telling me that wouldn't be a giant red flag waving over a giant neon arrow pointing at the word "cheater"? Because in my mind, that's one case where statistical analysis probably is going to hit a home run.Anonymous
July 03, 2008
Unfortunately, Kevin, what would probably happen is that the MCT involved would be considered such a great teacher that he would get more gigs doing the same cr*p, and would thus get more rewards from Microsoft than the rest of us. I don't know if it is possible, but one idea would be to place a "seed" in each exam in order to determine who leaked it. For example, if there is a question involving a GUID and/or even a company name or name of a person, each exam, at least in the beta and the first couple of days of release, would have it's own values, and could be traced to the person taking it and the exam center. If the braindumps contain that person's values, then he is probably the leaker. One can also seed the order of the answers. In a four-choice question, there are 24 (4 factorial) ways to order the answers. In a 40 question test, that makes 24^40 (16.1 septendecillion) different ways of ordering. That a match between a braindump and the order the questions were given to a particular person would be the same would be astronomical that the person was innocent. Another idea would be for Microsoft to flood the market with false braindumps, where perhaps the answer choices are the same, but the questions slightly different with different correct answers. (The answers in the braindumps would have to match the braindump's question to avoid it obviously being a fake, but not match the real questions enough to let the person pass.) I wouldn't buy a Rolex, even if I could afford one, for example, because there are too many fake ones out there. Since Microsoft will, unfortunately, never get rid of braindumps, reducing the validity of them would be one step in the right direction.Anonymous
July 03, 2008
Larry - no there are ten ways to order a 4 answer multi-choice question's answers. i.e. n*(max+min)/2. And for the questions there are 820 (same formula but I'm tired so arithmetic might be off...) even multiplying the two, if 50k people take it then you'll end out with 6-8 false positives. Probably a lot more when you discount "obviously wrong" answers.Anonymous
July 04, 2008
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July 04, 2008
Sounds great if you can do it. I always assumed that 'measuring the endstate' was a fairly small comment for a horrendously difficult thing to really do. But yes, ideally I guess "Set up automatic IP addressing and name resolution for a private class C network, and ensure a reverse name resolution is available" then dump someone at a server console is the way to go for "the 70-291 equivalent for Windows 7" :)Anonymous
July 04, 2008
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July 05, 2008
Ah...the old "adaptive testing" spectre. I agree, performance-based testing is the way to go. A lot of people who I've talked to always seemed worried about the simulations on the MCSE exams, but I found them refreshing. They never seemed tricky to me, and having years of experience with the product meant that I found doing the simulations easier than some of the Q&A style items. I can see why you'd have a hard time doing an entire exam of PBT/sims simply due to the amount of time it could take, but I'd definitely like to see more of that in the exams. I was very disappointed along those lines with the exams that I took for the MCITP:Enterprise Administrator cert.Anonymous
July 06, 2008
I have gone through all the exams required for the MCITP:Enterprise admin and MCITP:Database administrator. Now I suppose because of the NDA I can't mention which exams have, or dont have simulations.. But what I can say is that I thought the MCITP:Enterprise admin was very easy, and could be braindumped through extremely fast. The MCITP:DBA was a little harder IMO, but could still have been braindumped through easily. The simulations I have seen right now are just limited ones, a few clicks and you're done. I can't wait to see the actual virtual-server-through-rdp simulations. Those will be awesome, and I think it would be a much better exam. For example you could have 4 20minute questions, that's it. Have flexible scoring for different items in each question.. That way, by having only 4 "situations" per exam, you could design a hundred of them, and make it very hard for braindumpers to know which questions they will get, and even harder to memorize all the steps to 100*20minutes..Anonymous
July 06, 2008
- adaptive testing
- place a "seed" in each exam The above methods cannot stop the dump producers. The problem is the at the test centres. They can just attach some video recording devices to the test computers to get all the exams contents from the test takers. They don't need their employees to take the exams. Some "more" honest test centres will distribut the dump questions to all their students and to the Internet. (Yes, there are well known training centres who distribut special notes and deliver "Pre-Exams" for their students, but everyone in my city accept their existence...) Some "less" honest test centres will only distribut the dump questions to their own employees for "internal use". No test center is trustworthy.
Anonymous
July 08, 2008
i attended the event and found the presenter to be okay. obviously, she does a lot more legal work and lot less presenting that the technet team. it's a tough gig. That being said the material was worthwhile and i hope that we are seriously getting to the point where we can provide good study materials and prep materials that are compelling and eliminate as much of the braindump stuff as possible.Anonymous
July 11, 2008
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July 16, 2008
When is our hostess going to return to blogging?Anonymous
July 17, 2008
> When is our hostess going to return to blogging? She's probably gone undercover. I heard that there are a lot of braindumps going on in Maui and she's gone to personally investigate (or, at least, that's where Microsoft should send her next - just to be sure the rumor's false; heck, I'd be willing to go to "investigate"). Or maybe she's actually studying to take the 70-620 Vista exam. The third possibility is that the infamous Tick broke down. Will someone please investigate that van that's been parked by the side of the freeway for two weeks now.Anonymous
July 17, 2008
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July 21, 2008
JTB, Larry, Pierre, I thought you'd never ask. Yours from the side of the road, Skinner (that's my Tick name)