"He should participate in this debate he has started."
"He should participate in this debate he has started."
Last week, Labor Secretary Salvador Bello came up with a suggestion to do away with government licensure examinations. This would mean that those who studied law, medicine, accounting, engineering, nursing and others will no longer be required to take government licensure exams to practice their professions.
Predictably, his statement was met with a chorus of objections. One of them is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who said that the government must ensure that prospective lawyers must be qualified before they can practice their profession.
Considering that this issue is intimately related to education, it is inexplicable why the Secretary of Education was not asked for her opinion. She should be at the forefront in this debate. For instance, the DepEd can suggest other certification processes that can be adopted instead of only relying on written examinations. If we look at the percentage of those passing these government licensure exams, the number is low. In the Bar exams for lawyers, it is even much lower. This low rate of passing should ordinarily trigger a study to find out the reasons why and institute corrective measures.
But as far as I know, no study has ever been made or published. The government policy should be to try to pass as many as possible and not the other way around. Bello may simply have been thinking of the thousands who fail to pass the licensure exams and will have difficulty being absorbed into the labor force when he made the suggestion. In order to work, those who failed will have to retrain or work in areas other than their chosen fields which will usually result in lower pay. It is a great waste of human resources. Having government exams is a practice we inherited from the American.
There are countries in the world however, that do not require written exams but have other certification requirements beside sitting for a test. Maybe this is what the government should study. Coming up with alternative requirements like prescribed periods for on-the-job training or some kind of apprenticeship program. Perhaps a student upon enrollment for a college degree can have an option of what program to pursue. If the student chooses a non-licensure exam program, the course will be five years instead of the four-year program that will require an exam. It is very much like doing a graduate course. One can choose whether to go for a program that requires a thesis or a program that does not require one but still earn a degree. Even in the United States where the practice originated, there have been changes in the kind of exams given and administered.
It is about time we explored other alternatives and not be so fixated with written exams. One casualty of this practice are the borderline failures. These are the people who are a few decimal points short of the passing grades which in most cases is 75 percent. Should there be some kind of a remedial measure for them to avail of so that they can be licensed to practice besides taking the whole exam again?
This may not be a popular idea to our regulatory agencies. For one, almost all who have gone through an examination are against it. These yearly exams have also somewhat become part of our culture that it may not look right if we abolish them entirely. There is much anticipation attached to who will be in the top ten every time there is a licensure exam. This is especially true among lawyers. I suppose bragging rights are important to some people.
A minor downside of this practice however, is the problem of elitism which we all want to eliminate. A solution to this as someone suggested is to simply grade the exams with pass or fail. There will still be examinations but without the anticipated top ten list anymore. Only those who will pass will get their names published or announced. With this, even the school bragging rights will disappear. Bello, without probably intending it, seems to have created a minor tempest. But we have not heard from him anymore as to the reasons why he came out with the suggestion in the first place. He should participate a bit more in the debate that he created because there are valid reasons for some modifications in the system.
The world is changing as they say and we must change with it. It is therefore time for the government and other stakeholders to come together and study new ways for the purpose of adapting to the new realities of the times. There are, after all, many ways of maintaining the quality of the workforce while maximizing the utilization of available human resources.
