Too Many Exams?

 

Call a series of coincidences but around a week ago, the day job boss raised one of the sore points between us in a prospect meeting. He mentioned that in nearly a decade I had refused to take up a course in accountancy or to become a member of the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants (“ISCA”), despite the multitude of offers to pay for the course and also the fact that if I were qualified, I’d become so much more employable in Singapore’s market for insolvency practitioners.

This meeting happened two days before the Member of Parliament (MP) for West Coast GRC, Mr. Ang Wei Neng was forced to make a public apology after a public outcry for suggesting that degrees issued by local universities come with a “time-stamp,” thus forcing people to “renew” the validity of whatever they had learnt in university. More on the story can be found at:

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/singapore/mp-ang-wei-neng-timestamp-university-degrees-upgrading-food-thought-2536121

 

These two incidents highlight the one of the most prominent issues in Singapore today – the question of qualifications. Singapore is obsessed with paper qualifications. We famously send our best and brightest the world’s best universities and give them very cushy roles in the government. At the same time, we’re also complaining that despite claiming that the National University of Singapore (NUS) is a world class university, the graduates are losing out to the graduates from the University of Rubber Prata Pundek (URPP), based in Sathyavani Muthu Nagar, that exquisite part of Chennai.

This question of qualifications makes it easier to see the fault lines in Singapore’s social fabric. Think of us as being like Chicago in the movie “Divergent” where we’re grouped into fractions based on our paper qualifications. There are the elite running the parts of Singapore that count. These are inevitably run by Oxbridge or Ivy league graduates. Then there’s the “Paper-less” who are like the “Factionless” in the movie. They do the grunt work. Finally, you have those who occupy the space in between. This used to be stuffed with graduates from the local universities but over the course of the last decade, this group has been claiming that they’re bring screwed by the Ivy League and Oxbridge graduates who have invited the graduates from URPP to take the jobs that were once the preserve of local graduates.

So, what is the solution to help the local graduates? The solution has thus been to rely on a very Singaporean strength – taking exams. To “protect” the local graduates, the government has decided to “professionalise” certain professions by creating another layer of paper qualifications. In theory, this means that if a URPP graduate gets into a profession at the ground level, he or she will need to “professionalise” with “real” qualifications every so often, which would in theory put them at a disadvantage against the local graduates who have spent a lifetime mastering the fine art of taking and acing exams.

As with just about every proposal coming out of the Singapore elite, there is an amount of “good” in the idea. Doctors, lawyers and accountants, for example need to gain a license to practice. In law and accountancy there is a requirement to maintain a certain number of “professional points” a year to keep their license and the said points can only come from attending a number of training courses.

This is not a bad thing in as much as you want certain professions to be “up to date.” To paraphrase a former US President – “if you need surgery, you will want your surgeon to know everything there is to know about that surgery.” It is imperative to ensure that people practicing a certain profession are constantly up to date on whatever they need to be up to date about.

However, whilst it is good to encourage “life-long” learning and staying up to date on certain developments in a profession, there is a point where more exams does not equal greater “professionalism” but jobs for unusable bureaucrats. Take the exams that real-estate agents and insurance professionals have to take in order to get qualified.

Think of these exams as being like a member of an actor’s union. I remember a speaker at my school’s current affairs program telling us that “You need to be a member of the Actor’s Union in order to work as an Actor and 90 percent of Union Members are unemployed.” Aspiring real estate agents, for example, need to sit for a myriad of exams in order to work as real estate agents and yet they won’t see a penny from real estate until they sell a house.

The insurance business tries to justify this by “rebranding.” Go to enough insurance agency recruitment sessions and you’ll find the common refrain being “Insurance agents are a sunset industry – financial planning is a sunrise industry – you will be financial planners.” What is not said is that the job is essentially the same – you’re still selling financial products.

Sure, sales people do need to know what they’re selling and they need to be aware of a “code of ethics.” However, do you need more government mandated exams to do what should be done in-house?

It’s always good to have a level of “professionalism” in anything that you do. However, beyond a minimum, you shouldn’t impose more exams than necessary unless those exams have a very specific purpose towards the way the profession or industry should go. Adding exams beyond that only benefits repressed bureaucrats who were too afraid to take the plunge into doing anything useful.