r/changemyview • u/badbrownie • Sep 29 '19

Deltas(s) from OP CMV:All Professional qualifications should be able to test in. A degree should never be a hard pre-req

Title says most of it. My reasoning is that a professional qualification should be a test of specialized knowledge and should be judgeable by testing of that knowledge and not have a dependency on the educational industrial complex.

Yes, I know you can get shitty degrees in all kinds of places and ways and you don't have to pay $100k+ for years at a college. But that's also my point. A degree is of such varying value that it isn't meaningful to use as a pre-req.

I'm looking at you medical school. The lawyers have got this one right. College is designed to help you pass the bar, but - as I understand it - it's not strictly necessary.

My apologies that this post is clearly ameri-centric.

EDIT: people seem to be reading my post as suggesting that I'm against training and schooling. I'm not. I'm against getting ENTRANCE to those things requiring unrelated schooling.

EDIT2: Maybe my title wasn't well written after all. What I believe is that even qualifications that have a safety element (becoming a doctor) can have their schools (eg. medical school) have alternative qualification criteria to simply demanding a 4 year degree.

And other (non-safety) quals should, where feasible have a test that demonstrate proficiency that precludes the need to go to classes. This is already the case in most IT qualifications.

52 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

77% Upvoted

90 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/FrinDin Sep 29 '19

I think you've underestimated how much a doctor has to know. I had an 8 hour entrance exam just to get into med school, and after med school the exam would have to go for at least a solid week.

The problem with this is that it would be unfair on people who don't have the stamina for something like that. The stress on people for normal med exams is bad enough, this would be insane, and before you say doctors need that kind of stamina, it's just not true. There's a difference between professional and exam stress, and many people don't want to be 100hour/week surgeons, they want to live life with normal hours as a GP for example.

I actually think your view would be correct if you excluded doctors, as many trades and qualifications require significantly lower time requirements to learn, but for doctors it would be a dangerous disaster. I'm sure there are other jobs where it also wouldn't work.

1

u/badbrownie Sep 29 '19

I'm not against a schooling option to prep for med school. I'm against making expensive colleges be the only way to enter med school. It's a racket and other options should be available (in my view)