Centralized board exams a problem that should be abolished, 1

IMAGINE: A nuclear reactor run by nuclear engineers.

The engineers are knowledgeable in their field from years of study in competent universities and colleges, trained with hundreds of hours of practical experience, highly skilled from having been apprenticed to teachers that are senior nuclear engineers.

We can all agree that the above attributes are what defines them to be nuclear engineers in the first place.

Then some people in the country’s capital get an idea.

There is now a new definition of a nuclear engineer. The nuclear engineers have to pass an exam for them to be defined as nuclear engineers. The exams are written by, say, six or seven people hundreds of kilometers away based in the country’s capital. The applicants do not know them. Neither do the examiners know the applicants.

It doesn’t matter if an applicant has not attended a single class on nuclear engineering, or trained under senior engineers. As long as he passes the exams by people who never trained or him and do not know him, he is by definition a nuclear engineer.

Such “nuclear engineers” then take over the nuclear reactor. It does not take a prophet gifted with divine revelation to predict what would happen in a few days, weeks, or months.

Kaboom! An explosion or a meltdown.

It’s fundamentally silly, isn’t it? Defining a professional by having an applicant or student answer questions made by people who never knew him, and whom he never knew nor probably never would know.

Yet that is what happens in every centralized licensure exam.

Let’s take a concrete case, a doctor. A doctor, for at least 2000 years, was defined by knowledge accumulated in his field from years of study in learning institutions or colleges under senior physicians, trained for years as apprentices with these physicians, possesses practical experience in his field under the supervision of these mentors of his.

Nowadays though, a student can theoretically skip all his classes in a medical school, absent himself from any internship or practical training; and yet still be a doctor as long as he passes an exam, written by people who he does not know, and do not know him at all. Ditto for other professions that have centralized licensure or board exams.

All because at present, it is passing a licensure exam that defines a doctor or certain other professionals, not his knowledge, skills, competence.

This system leads inevitably to corruption, and incompetence. Say a student, as narrated above, skips all his classes and practical internship. He or his school bribes the medical examiners to obtain a copy of the answer keys to the licensure exams.

Viola! We now have a new physician, who is essentially not a doctor at all; yet is legally one by virtue of passing a series of questions made by people perhaps hundreds of kilometers away, whom he doesn’t know, or who never knew him.

There are professions and fields fortunately that have been able to avoid such a centralized and essentially ridiculous system. Such as painting, writing, physics, chemistry, many kinds of sciences and sports, the military, and so on. No licensure exams for them. Yet these professionals in their fields are as competent as can be, as any doctor in his field of expertise. Just as physicians were as competent before World War 2 even without centralized licensure exams. (To be continued)/PN