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Old 07-24-2012, 12:15 AM   #26
Steven Lake
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Quote:
Originally Posted by LuvReadin View Post
Oh, that sounds sooo familiar. And yet the professors (in the UK sense of major big-shot senior academic) with years of experience will happily submit to their copy being edited and even thank the copyed for improving their work!
Well, there's a term for this that comes out of the early days of the tech industry. There was a computer certification at the time called "MCSE", or "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer". The tests were entirely multiple choice and no hands on, allowing people to cheat very, very easily on them using brain dumps and other cheating methods. The ease by which these tests could be passed by nearly anybody created a class of engineers we called "Paper MCSE's". They were people who'd passed the test, but didn't know jack squat about the systems they were working on. Those that knew the systems were called "Practical MCSE's".

The profs you mention sound a lot like the Practical MCSE's we had, whereas the lady I mentioned was the literary equivalent of a Paper MCSE.
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