Re. Certification rebuttal/follow-on

[Geoff Hart <geoff-h -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

 Dan Martilloti provided useful critiques on my proposal for
 certification based on "past work". For the sake of
 clarification, Dan is on the right track... I provided the
 outline, and I'm hoping others will jump in to help resolve
 some details. But to respond to Dan's questions:

 1. Recent graduates could be graded on their coursework or,
 alternatively, be listed as apprentices until they produced
 their first work. Apprenticeship systems have advantages
 (e.g., you can start work without a certificate) and
 disadvantages (e.g., problems with exclusionary guilds);
 one big advantage is that apprenticeships could formalize
 mentoring, something that smooths the transition into the
 work environment.

 2. I suggested that several pieces of work might be
 required for a "senior" certificate; as Dan noted, one
 large work might be even better proof of skill than several
 small pieces. I'd certainly consider it as such.

 3. Identifying someone's contribution to a team project
 (such as a large manual) is the most problematic part of my
 proposal. You'd have to work with the person's supervisors
 and clients to identify this, or alternatively, interview
 candidates to determine what design problems they faced and
 how they resolved them. (This knowledge, with examples
 provided by pointing them out in the published text, would
 be more useful than a simple claim that you wrote the whole
 thing; it would be hard to come up with spurious
 constraints and solutions that would convince an
 experienced writer... lies catch up to you eventually.) I'm
 not 100% happy with this solution, but explaining how and
 why you did what you did is a step in the right direction.
 Any other alternatives?

 4. If the work was edited or part of a team effort, the
 same note applies. In this case, candidates would indicate
 the problems the editor or team found and corrected, and
 what they learned from this experience. After all, working
 in a team, or with an editor, is part of the job, and
 should be evaluated somehow. Problem: team members or an
 editor might provide useful info, or might not, depending
 on their feelings about the candidate (e.g., whitewash or
 get revenge). Again, any other alternatives?

 5. Good writing is indeed good writing, whatever the
 circumstances, but you have to be realistic. I'm a good
 writer, but the text I put onscreen to send to this list,
 written in a minute or two per posting between the tasks of
 my real job, don't hold a candle to what I can do in a few
 hours, with a good library and time to rewrite properly.
 Even excellent writers don't produce excellent work
 consistently under tight deadlines; find a reporter in your
 newspaper who writes news stories as well as a weekly
 column to see the difference that a little time makes.

 6. Peer review is a problem, because it is subjective. But
 if you get turned down by one review board and approved by
 the next, odds are that you're still probably certifiable.
 Yes, this is a flexible standard, but perhaps there are
 more objective criteria we could develop for the board to
 use. For ex., STC has a list of reasonably objective
 criteria that they use in their annual publications
 competition; these might be a good start.

 To close this longwinded response, I'm not coming out in
 favor of certification; neither am I irrevocably against
 the idea. But if someone does decide to impose it on us,
 I'd like it to be on terms that _I_ can live with. Being
 evaluated on the basis of my work is much more attractive
 to me than whether I was able to complete a two-hour test
 well.

 --Geoff Hart    @8^{)}
 geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

 Disclaimer: If I didn't commit it in print in one of our
 reports, it don't represent FERIC's opinion.