How should an individual be punished for cheating?

In my last blog I talked about the different punishment standards recently introduced by Microsoft. A test-center (CPLS) only faces a suspension, where as an individual faces a life-time ban. I think we need to further address the punishment for cheating – by both individuals and by CPLSs – uh “test-centers”.

If you are remotely curious as to how prevalent cheating is in the IT field – just do a search on the Internet for “braindumps” and you will be surprised at the results. There are dozens – literally dozens of places that will be more than happy to sell you a “study guide” for a test. These “study guides” ARE the tests and have questions and answers. All you have to do is memorize the answers and go take your test and trust that the answers, as presented in the “study guide” are the correct ones (yeah, right, uh-huh, sure!). All seems simple enough. But how about when an individual goes for a job interview and presents their newly minted certificate and gets hired (possibly preventing someone who has years of hands-on experience but doesn’t have the certification from getting hired) and you have to work with this yeah-who (or worse – have to report this nabob)? This is but one of the problems we encounter with braindumps.

So what happens when a person gets caught using a braindump? According to Microsoft, they are banned for life – a harsh penalty don’t you think? Let’s think about for this for a minute In professional sports or the Olympics, a person faces a suspension – not expulsion for a first offense. This seems reasonable. A person gets caught taking a proscribed supplement (I only thought it was a balm to help sore muscles after swinging a bat all the time….honest) – they face a 2 or more year ban and a second infraction could seem them banned for life. Why not the same here? A person gets caught cheating, they are banned “suspended” for 2-3 years and have to re-earn all of their Microsoft certifications. If you are a trainer and caught cheating (either on the test or by giving students braindumps) a 2-3 year ban could be a career killer, but at least they would have the option of retesting and becoming a trainer again. A second infraction would then see them banned by Microsoft all together.

Here is a thought to help counter cheating - if all the test vendors would agree to this standard, you might see more action against braindump sites. So let us say you get caught cheating on a Microsoft test (or any other test vendor), ALL, yes ALL of your certifications from all vendors would be suspended and would have to be re-earned. Now that would be a fitting punishment and yet would still allow the individual to re-earn their certifications.