Microsoft's 10-year-old Certified Professional

idigjazz writes "Meet Arfa, a promising young software programmer from Faisalabad, Pakistan, who is believed to be the youngest Microsoft Certified Professional in the world. She received the certification when she was 9. During a recent meeting with Bill Gates, she presented him with a poem she wrote that celebrated his life story."

Comments

How difficult is that certification?

[Underholdning]

Before the flood of jokes start, I'd like to ask those of you who are MSCP (I know you're out there) how difficult is it to get that certification? Is this really a child prodigy, or are the questions ultra simple?

Re:How difficult is that certification?

[FridayBob]

I'm no MSCP, but I hear from people who have followed the courses that they're not very impressive. Basically, they just teach you how Microsoft programs work, but give little or no background information. As a result, this produces people who, for instance, are certified for MS Exchange, but don't know much about SMTP -- they just know Exchange.

Nevertheless, I suppose it's still impressive when a 10-year old gets though these exams... if only because it means they did a lot of reading and actually worked with a computer (instead of just playing games on it). Hell, most kids that age have the attention span of a flash bulb!

Re:Equal Opportunities

[Artega VH]

The girl says it "should" be balanced. Which I read to mean that ideally it should be balanced. It's impossible to know what she exactly meant by that short quote however.

And in general to the people who are scoffing at the MCAD - she's 10 years old. Perhaps that escaped your massive brains but this is an article talking about something that is a good achievement for someone her age. Its not even worth noting for someone only a few years older than her. At 10 most slashdotters were still singing soprano and afraid of girl germs (It seems some still are).

Well done to Arfa and her father. I hope she becomes a very competent member of the software development community. We can all hope she discovers the wonders of open source though...

Re:Just confirms

[Lumpy]

MOST of what I found in the microsoft certifications are more based on learning the microsoftspeak and less about specifics.

microsoft went out of it's way to make sure that someone that learned how to admin on their own can NOT pass the tests without buying the coursework or taking classes.

Example? sure...

What partition do you boot from? Boot or system?

if you said boot then you are wrong. Microsoft says you boot from the system partition, and run from the boot partition.. now this was back in my NT4 sertification days, they may have removed that decietful nugget of information by now but I doubt it. they intentionally obfuscate and use backward speak to make sure that someone that had been in computers for 20 years can NOT pass the test without paying for courses or books.

Very scumbaggy of them.

Yes and no.

[rjh]

First, congratulations to her: yes, it's an accomplishment. The only reason we think it's a major accomplishment, though, is we've been fooled into thinking kids can't learn complex things. We mistakenly think that kids are capable of much less than they are--not because the kids can't perform up to their capability, but because the educational system doesn't do the kids justice.

I was lucky. When I was in elementary school and showed a real gift for computers, several teachers went considerably out of their way to put me in groups of people who knew what they were doing. By the time I was nine, I was spending my summers in the local community college's computer lab. I wasn't taking college courses, no, but my teachers hooked me up with a student named David Carlson and asked if he could just spend an hour each week answering my questions.

David became my best friend in no time flat. An hour a week turned into a considerably more during the summertime, between his jobs and other commitments. I learned LISP from David (on a Symbolics LISP Machine--talk about your sexy hardware). Shortly after I turned ten, David showed me the Y-combinator. It took me a few weeks to understand it, but when I did--whoa! I was blinded, just blinded, by the beauty of it.

Then we moved away to a different city, different school system. Supposedly this one was much better, but there were no longer any teachers who'd go out of their way to recruit college students into letting me hang out with them for a while. They expected me to go through the exact same hoops as anyone else. I wasn't even allowed to take Programming in BASIC at the high school level. No more LISP Machines for me. From '86 to '92, I had no access to any machines more powerful than an Apple IIgs, and no languages more powerful than Basic. I wouldn't get access to a LISP environment again until I got to college in '94.

Now I'm a graduate student. Last semester I took a course in programming language theory, where we were exposed to the beauty of the Y-combinator. And to think... I knew the Y-combinator when I was just ten years old, just due to the kindness of a smart college student who wasn't smart enough to know "the Y-combinator is too much for kids".

David Carlson was the finest teacher I ever had, because he didn't have preconceptions about what I could or couldn't learn. And as soon as we moved away and my education got turned over to bureaucrats who were concerned about "age-appropriate academic skills", I got left out in the cold.

David died a couple of years ago of brain cancer, way before his time; he was barely forty. He left behind a wife and kids, and you know what? I think those kids are going to turn out to be geniuses. Because he and his wife were too damn dumb to know their kids couldn't possibly learn things.

Submitted this two months ago

[Carlos Laviola]

Here are your recent submissions to Slashdot, and their status within the system:

* 2005-05-05 22:04:04 Nine year old girl becomes an MCP (IT,Microsoft) (rejected)

I wonder what makes the story more interesting now that it is old.