Make the certification standards free as in speech, charge a minimal fee to cover administration of the exams, and go to town.
These certifications were absolutely useless when it came to getting me a job whenever I interviewed somewhere where they knew what they were doing. All they proved was that I was particularly good at studying and taking tests. This may be a useful skill in another career but in IT (the area of the certs) and even more in software (where I work now) memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless in the era of StackOverflow and Google.
Any sort of programming certification test would be gameable. A test that can be gamed isn't useful for hiring - once again, you're not proving they're a competent programmer, just that they're good at taking tests. No company you want to get hired at will use such a metric.
If it was possible to prove the quality of a coder via a certification test, we'd be out of a job. One of the key signs of a good programmer is their ability to expertly handle problems & situations they've never encountered before, which is (by definition) impossible via some sort of standardized test.
A certification might prove that I've memorized the parameters that get passed into the function in Array.prototype.map but it'll never tell me if someone can build software solutions to real-life problems.
Code bootcamps do provide some usefulness, and you could problably look at that syllabus and come up with a more portable ciriculum that you could teach to people with aptitude but without credentials.
It would be great to use something like this in civil service and other areas to give disadvantaged folks a way to get into the industry without a four year degree in CS.
It's bizarre though. Companies won't even look at CS graduates from state schools, but will hire someone who went through a glorified training class.
Don't Amazon, Facebook, et. al. send recruiting teams to most state schools?
I think it depends on the quality/prestige of the CS program.
(I am excluding the University of California system because its high cost and stringent admissions make it more similar to private institutions)
Able to read, manipulate, and emit the contents of a file.
And the test point given by one proctor consisted of:
Write a program which accepts this file and translates all 'c' characters to 'C' characters, and puts the modified contents of the file to stdout.
Nothing too fancy, but a useful starting point (feel free to come up with a better test question than the one I devised in under 15 seconds).
Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school.
> memorizing rote knowledge is nigh-useless
I used to think this, but accessing data in your brain is faster than accessing it on Stack Overflow. And sometimes it's impossible to find the right answer without at least having the right terminology.
"remove an item from a list where each item in the list has a reference to the next item in that list" doesn't return a meaningful Stack Overflow result, and the notes from a CS course show up below the fold in a google search; yet the use of the rote-learned phrase "linked list" yields not only a page full of meaningful google results, but the suggestions include every language which uses linked lists.
> Could it be gamed? Of course. But then so can a University course. As can an interview. As can a coding school.
It's a lot harder to game those things than it is a certification test.
Seems to be working for the American Bar Association.