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World's Youngest Microsoft Certificated Professional Is Five Years Old
HughPickens.com writes Gurvinder Gill writes at BBC that Ayan Qureshi is the world's youngest Microsoft Certified Professional after passing the tech giant's exam when he was just five years old. Qureshi's father introduced his son to computers when he was three years old. He let him play with his old computers, so he could understand hard drives and motherboards. "I found whatever I was telling him, the next day he'd remember everything I said, so I started to feed him more information," Qureshi explained. "Too much computing at this age can cause a negative effect, but in Ayan's case he has cached this opportunity." Ayan has his own computer lab at his home in Coventry, containing a computer network which he built and spends around two hours a day learning about the operating system, how to install programs, and has his own web site.
Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) is a certification that validates IT professional and developer technical expertise through rigorous, industry-proven, and industry-recognized exams. MCP exams cover a wide range of Microsoft products, technologies, and solutions. When the boy arrived to take the Microsoft exam, the invigilators were concerned that he was too young to be a candidate. His father reassured them that Ayan would be all right on his own. "There were multiple choice questions, drag and drop questions, hotspot questions and scenario-based questions," Ayan's father told the BBC Asian Network. "The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five-year-old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory."
Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) is a certification that validates IT professional and developer technical expertise through rigorous, industry-proven, and industry-recognized exams. MCP exams cover a wide range of Microsoft products, technologies, and solutions. When the boy arrived to take the Microsoft exam, the invigilators were concerned that he was too young to be a candidate. His father reassured them that Ayan would be all right on his own. "There were multiple choice questions, drag and drop questions, hotspot questions and scenario-based questions," Ayan's father told the BBC Asian Network. "The hardest challenge was explaining the language of the test to a five-year-old. But he seemed to pick it up and has a very good memory."
I agree with you. While he's probably a very bright kid and I would not seek to take anything away from him..... it bears comment.
My team used to refer to "MCSE" as "Make Coffee Send Errand". Mostly because of the issue you are pointing out: these guys had no skills whatsoever.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
The problem is that you only have to remember specific information to pass a certification. /why/ it is the way it is. Only that it is.
This doesn't mean you know
This makes the difference between IT professionals who love their work, and will find new solutions, versus the sys admin who can follow the instructions laid out before him.
You might be able to say 'FTP uses TCP' 'Voice uses UDP' Oh, you passed.
This doesn't mean that they understand that TCP sends acks for each received packet to insure each one is received in order, and if it isn't, it resends the package.
That UDP sends it blindly hoping it worked.
Or why. E.G FTP uses TCP because you're transferring files, if part of the file is missing, it's toast. So you need acknowledgement for each packet sent.
UDP is used for voice. This is because with voice, if part of it is missing you get a slight drop in quality, a blip or blurp in sound, machine like sounds or depending how long, a missed word or two.
You can still understand the conversation for the most part with minor impact. If it was TCP, people would cut out a lot more vs the odd artifact in the sound.
This isn't what happened here. It's one thing for a kid to play and learn. Here we have a father pursuing his sons MCP certification, for his own gratification. If this was about the kid, it wouldn't be in the news.
Area51 - We are watching...
Sure, the MCP test isn't that great. But a 5 year old kid passing them does show a drive for learning that most American 5-year-old kids don't have (for various reasons). Most American kids that age wouldn't even be able to read the questions, let alone answer them. Unless his dad was able to read the questions to him and then put his answers in for him, the kid has exhibited a superior reading and writing ability in comparison to most.
Hopefully he doesn't end up becoming a desk jockey troubleshooting windows PCs. If he keeps up this desire to learn he should be able to go much, much, further. I wish him well (and I wish him a better OS as well!).
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
There is a third option: The boy is a "paper" MCP. He knows the right answer to the questions, but doesn't understand the reasoning behind it.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I did the exam for windows NT 4.0, it was a while ago.
But knowing about windows hampers your ability to pass the exam. If you only read the book and never touched a computer that will make that exam easy.
The questions are in multiple choice, but you need to give the 'best' answer. Most of the time three of the four answers will solve the problem.
Just keep in mind: if one of the answers is "Reinstall windows" than that is the correct 'best' answer (this was the 'best' answer of 5 of the questions on the exam), if one of the answers is 'edit the registry' than this is the 'worst' answer (even if it solved everything and is the quickest/easiest way of doing it).
True. I learned how to program on an Apple //e in the 6th grade in 1986 -- first Applesoft Basic and then assembly language. By the time I got out of college 10 years later and got my first job, there were no Apple //e's anywhere and no one wanted a 65C02 assembly language programmer! Spending six years learning how to program before going to college did me know good. It's like knowing the fundamentals really was a waste of time and was so not transferrable.....
Well, it depends upon the job. As OneSmartFellow correctly divines, a recent post was for a sysadmin / sysops post. We don't require other devs to know what ARP is, but it's always good if they have some idea about the network stack.
We have been repeatedly amazed by the levels of ignorance that IT-qualified candidates have had. One of the most disappointing finds is that very few who have come from university have any substantial programming experience. Likewise, 'hack-a-day' php coders and sql-ers about, but most of them do not know when to apply a left join, some of them don't even know what a key is used for (just think of all that wasted cpu time due to ridiculously poor sql implementations. It makes me shudder).
Regarding the idea of methods for developing a re-usable, maintainable codebase for our work (primarily webwork) - seems to be beyond everyone that we recruit. The team that we have right now is second to none - but we have found that a well-written test reduces the initial number of applicants from about 700 to 800 down to about 10, most of whom we will interview.
This comment was written with the intention to opt out of advertising.
MCP, however, is a pushover. You can get that by simply passing one of the MCSE tests, usually the one centered around the workstation OS.
If you can install it and do very rudimentary administration, you can get an MCP.
Still impressive at the age of 5 though.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
People laugh at that comment but he's quite right. It is literally impossible to work today in the programming field with just the information you can remember in your head. You should instead focus on getting people with good reasoning and research skills. People who can learn fast, apply past lessons and derive a correct solution based on your situation.
There's still a need for quite a large amount of information to be remembered by team members, but that is definitely trumped by how fast they can acquire it from resources they will have on hand at their work. For programmers they will have a syntax highlighting, auto-completing editor, project and make file management tools, language references, API references, and of course, vast realms of information on the net.
I was a little surprised the other day when I tried to remember the old definition for an OOP language. Inheritance and encapsulation jumped straight to mind but the third was just out of reach of my memory - despite actually using it every day for almost 30 years; polymorphism. I'd had to think I wouldn't pass some recruiter's idea of an test simply because my memory isn't what it used to be.
There's some skills like regex that I need to look up every time I use them. Mostly because they are used infrequently, have an arcane syntax, an API that varies from one language / environment to the next and every implementation seems to use different syntax. I've written heaps of SQL, I know where to place a key when to leave it down to a table scan. I can find my way through a query plan and figure out which part of a query is nonce...and yet I might still have trouble remembering some vague syntax thing. I have existing code to remind me and the web for when I don't have a snippet.
There's too much emphasis on rote learning of information that often is not even that useful, and not enough on developing analysis, research and planning skills.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Before accepting that a 5 year old not only passed the exam, but could read and comprehend at a fully adult level, I have another hypothesis: the dad did it... He obviously made the kid's website, so why would it surprise anyone if he "helped" the kid through the test. It's the same way that kids used to win slot-racing competitions.
While a good exam isn't supposed to test the student's ability to understand the language, it is supposed to test the student's ability to understand the underlying concepts. This means that the exam should, in part, test the student's ability to read a question, identify the key concepts, and figure out what is an appropriate answer based on those key concepts. If you receive help reading the question by converting concepts into something easier to understand, then that would seem to undermine the test result and therefore the certification achievement. Not to the point where it's completely void, but it may not be completely accurate to the kid's skill level
Now, i don't know if the parent acted as a dictionary or actually simplified the language, but the sentence in the summary does seem concerning.