> Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test. If you talk to someone for thirty minutes about the same subfield as you do, y

> Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test. If you talk to someone for thirty minutes about the same subfield as you do, you can definitely tell whether they know it. Mass testing on paper is harder because of cheating (even if only a small minority does it, it defeats the purpose). It's orders of magnitude cheaper to have a good test, one-on-one if need be, as compared to hiring all the teachers necessary to give everyone a standardized education. I've learned very little in my master's. Call me the problem for already knowing most concepts and just having to learn-by-heart some protocol byte offsets (yes, that was actually asked on a closed-book test), but a year of memorization of some specific things is and getting a certificate for that is far less valuable/actionable than making sure someone can do the actual job and giving a certificate for that. Yet the former certificate is what most companies base starting pay grade on, or for being considered at all, no matter what they claim before you get to HR. (Edited the number in first response line from hyperbole to actual estimate. Also loving that people are downvoting reality they, I guess, don't like? Or what's the problem?)