My LPI exam results came on Thursday, but I only just read the email…
Score Report for Exam 101 Your Score: 660 Required Passing Score: 500 Status: Pass Test Section Information Percent Correct Section 71% Hardware Architecture 78% Linux Installation & Package Management 95% GNU & Unix Commands 100% Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 75% The X Window System
Score Report for Exam 102 Your Score: 690 Required Passing Score: 500 Status: Pass Test Section Information Percent Correct Section 100% Kernel 75% Boot, Initialization, Shutdown and Runlevels 100% Printing 100% Documentation 100% Shells, Scripting, Programming and Compiling 66% Administrative Tasks 100% Networking Fundamentals 94% Networking Services 83% Security
Given my intense need to know just how much cleverer I am than those around me, I went to the LPI website to find out just what the LPI scores mean. It turns out that they’re scaled to give a mean of 480 and a standard deviation of 100.
If you’re not familiar with standard deviation, Wikipedia to the rescue: 
This means that passing should be just under 50%. However, their stats say that the pass-rate was about 64% up to 2003, and the recent stats say they’ve given 100k exams and have 32k certified LPIC-1′s — you need two exam passes to be an LPIC-1. Well, I guess at least they’re consistent over the years…
More importantly, this means that my 101 result puts me at the middle-high end of the 84.1 — 97.7% block (1σ-2σ) and my 102 result puts me at the low end of the 97.7% — 99.8% block (2σ-3σ). Which means a score between 780 and 860 is top-0.2%, for those playing along at home.
I’m quite pleased, given they only took me around 20 minutes each. ^_^
So how am I spending my weekend? Installing Visual Studio for a development project I’ve won. >_<
I also recently discovered a new prime number generation algorithm. Ask a client to submit all their new artwork for their website. Some portion of it will need scaling down. And some portion of that will have a dimension that is prime. O_O
Edit: Fix image
