Unless Brainbench has changed a lot since June 17, 2000, don't be too proud. 15% more salary for having basic knowledge seems unfair if you have been coding Perl all along.

I got certified in 2000 by Brainbench as a "Perl Programmer" at "Master" level. That was one year after first using Perl. I didn't even use strict back then. The Brainbench certification tests I did are the most meaningless tests I know. I have 14 of those certificates, including in subjects that I did really not know about (like, ehm, "Javascript Programmer". I only recently learned that Javascript has anonymous functions (and closures), that objects are arrays and what kind of scoping it has.).