The general approach has been that if you already had a certificate, then you should consider it “grandfathered”. You won’t lose it on your account. If you’re partially through a certificate it’s expected that you will update your projects to meet the new criteria. When going from one update to the next, this usually requires little work. Over the last 4 years, however, FCC has changed quite a bit. The older projects are, the further they are going to be from the current ones.
The Academic Honesy Policy is specifically targeted at plagarism, rather than testing:
Before you can claim a verified certification, you must accept the Academic Honesty Policy below.
I understand that plagiarism means copying someone else’s work and presenting the work as if it were my own, without clearly attributing the original author.
I understand that plagiarism is an act of intellectual dishonesty, and that people usually get kicked out of university or fired from their jobs if they get caught plagiarizing.
Aside from using open source libraries such as jQuery and Bootstrap, and short snippets of code which are clearly attributed to their original author, 100% of the code in my projects was written by me, or along with another camper with whom I was pair programming in real time.
I pledge that I did not plagiarize any of my freeCodeCamp work. I understand that freeCodeCamp’s team will audit my projects to confirm this.
In the situations where we discover instances of unambiguous plagiarism, we will replace the camper in question’s certification with a message that “Upon review, this account has been flagged for academic dishonesty.”
As an academic institution that grants achievement-based certifications, we take academic honesty very seriously. If you have any questions about this policy, or suspect that someone has violated it, you can email team@freecodecamp.org and we will investigate.
Right now, project links are on the honor system. Your project will show up as completed as long as you submit a link. I believe that there are ongoing efforts to make unit tests automatic and a required part of project submission.
As far as I’m concerned, the question isn’t about whether you have the right to claim a certificate but whether redoing or updating your projects is valuable to you. I would argue that it is. It will improve your skills in the required areas and it is also something that you are likely to find yourself doing during your career (if you choose to pursue a career in web programming). If you are so skilled and experienced in the technologies that you don’t need the practice, then the certificate doesn’t really matter anyway.
P.S. Nice Hanklerfish