OT: bitter, cynical political rant (was: Re: Biometrics)

[Bill Vermillion]

On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 11:12:58AM -0700, Bill Campbell thus spoke:
> On Mon, Jun 07, 2004, Bill Vermillion wrote:

[lots deleted - wjv]

Jay said:

> >> Gee, then why did the FBI say it was "a guaranteed, 100% accurate
> >> match"?

...

> >The best rule to follow is never trust anything that is "100%
> >guaranteed" "will never fail"  or uses the words "always" or
> >"never"

> >The only thing you can amost always be 100% sure of is that what
> >you are told is not 100% accurate.

> There was a long article in today's issue of the Seattle Times
> about the FBI finger printing work, and one of the main points
> was that the people doing the analysis are often poorly trained,
> and that the FBI's certification tests are a bad joke (e.g. the
> same prints year after year with the same answers :-).

I guess the 'gummint' has really changed with belt tightening and so
forth.   The two Federal tests I took were for the FCC 1st Class
license [long since obsolete] and a pilots license.

They used to change the tests regularly and throw out all questions
that everyone was able to get right.

And at the time I took the FCC exam since they had so many taking
the tests you could be sure that there were at least 6 different
tests in the room at the same time so even if you copied from
soneone next to you you would most probably be wrong.

I do recall that on the schematics you had to correct the only one
that remained the same was for the colpitts oscillator [?? - I'm
pulling this from a memory bank far away].  Our instructor said
even the FCC didn't quite understand how that one worked and 
always had only thing they'd ever change.  We could never be sure
on the other diagrams however.

The diagrams at that office [with typically 25 people taking the
exam each day] were used only if you didn't get enough points to
pass on the multiple choice tests.

You never knew your real score. They would count the points as
they went through each question and when your test hit a passing
score they stopped grading.

As always the government always seem to have more to do than people
to do it.  

With never varying tests - at least part of it - you wind up
with the cheat books and you really test an invidiual for
knowledge, just for memory.  But that seems to be the method in a
great many parts of education today - you are taught to pass tests
with the emphasis on learning the material seemingly secondary.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com