Certification: False Postives versus False Negatives

OK, lots of people are aware of the false positives of certification. Like Scott Hanselman, who says "I know lots of people who are certified that I woudn't hire."

But what about about the false negatives? I recall a fellow who - back when the first VB exam was administered - bitched to numerous people at MS that he should be granted a certification even though he had FAILED THE EXAM 5 TIMES. No, that's not an exaggeration. When you consider that the question pool for that exam only had enough questions for two different forms of the exam, that means that he'd seen every question at least twice. His reasoning was that, since he was a MS MVP for Visual Basic (also true), somebody at Microsoft knew that he really knew the material. Yeah, sure. <g>