I scored 80% on the exam, so why am I so hostile toward it? Because the exam was utter rubbish. The whole 'train'/test/certify paradigm is utter rubbish; and I can back up that assertion. I could go through that exam question by question and demonstrate that virtually every question is largely irrelevant to the task of servicing the printers, and that the knowledge needed to correct the printers' typical failures is not touched upon at all, ever; not even hinted at.
"How can that be?" you may wonder. Fair question. Permit me to give you my take on it.
The 'training' material and the exam do not exist for the purpose of teaching anyone anything useful about the actual equipment; about its strengths and weaknesses and how to rectify its common failures. If they did, they would have been created by people who know those things. But their creators demonstrably know nothing of the kind.
The 'training' material and the exam exist primarily for the purpose of generating revenue, and reinforcing a class structure and its attendant orthodoxies.
The fee to sit the exam was $10.00 US. Once the exam, all thirty questions of it, has been created and rendered into its on-line format, the cost of having done that is soon recovered, and every subsequent fee is almost entirely profit. It must be quite a lucrative racket.
As for the class structure reinforcement, here's how that works:
Understand that there is a distinct class structure in the printer service industry. Working technicians populate the lower class. They're regarded, as are all working people, as sweaty, dusty morons who at least have the saving grace of knowing that it's 'clockwise to tighten, counterclockwise to loosen'. In order for them to be competent in their work, they must be taken by the hand and made to receive 'knowledge' from their intellectual betters in the upper class.
The upper class is populated by managers and administrators and 'trainers' and technical 'writers' who possess important conceptual knowledge of things like paper tray capacities, and the colours of blinking LEDs. It's their job to convey such knowledge to the sweaty masses and test them on their grasp of it. Passing the multiple-choice test qualifies the morons to service the gear.
My employer and I acquiesce to this farce solely out of business considerations. Without the 'qualification', we won't be granted warranty service provider status by HP; it's a form of protection racket, really. By acquiescing to the process and participating in it, we grant it legitimacy and keep ourselves in our place. What ought to be happening is that my employer and I should be hauling HP over the coals for the abysmal quality of their service manuals, and the worthlessness of their 'training'/exams.
Nowhere in all of this does anyone in authority with the practical competence and intelligence of a housewife ever ask, "What does the job of servicing printers actually consist of, and what does a technician need to know in order to do it?" Were such a person ever to pose that question and seek an answer to it, the orthodox 'train'/test/certify paradigm would get hauled off to the landfill where it belongs, and we'd begin to see something useful put in its place.
Will my comment have any effect on the upper class' view of what it's doing? No, it won't. It will be written off as the bitter, twisted muttering of a failure -- a member of an intellectually inferior class. If he were of a better class, he wouldn't be a technician, would he now? And around and around we go.
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In closing, here's a little anecdote to illustrate how thoroughly the class structure and its orthodoxies permeate peoples' thinking:Later the same day, I had occasion to tell someone about the exam, and that I'd scored 80% on it. Her immediate response was to the effect of, "You've been at that work so long, why didn't you score 100%?" (I defy anyone to score 100% on those exams without the benefit of at least a few very lucky guesses. Some of the questions are so ambiguously put, or deal with such opaque trivia as to be utterly confounding.)
People reflexively take for granted that an 'authority' is legitimate, and that the onus is on those without authority to measure up to the authority's requirements. In reality in this case, HP's 'authority' stems entirely from its economic clout -- its power to operate what amounts to a protection racket. The intellectual/technical underpinnings of that authority are dross.
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