Ship of Fools: Government exams to qualify for things are unfair

Thread: Government exams to qualify for things are unfair Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on :

In All Saints I posted about having bought an old and sheap sailboat, and that I had to do an exam to run the little auxiliary 4 HP motor. The exam made me learn completely irrelevant things, like how to use a VHF marine radio, how to anchor a 60 foot yacht, and pretty well how to drive a submarine (okay, not that, but everything else).

I then saw in someone's ship profile about a British citizenship test. So I did a free practice exam. And saw that most Brits actually fail it like I did the first time. I passed the second time. Just. Same pattern with the silly Canadian boat exam.

I think this tendency to give people exams is over the top, and at least 50% of questions are irrelevant. I am aware that courts in some places have suggested that as long as the questions 'look' sensible, it does not matter if they actually assess anything relevant. I think this is totally unfair, and exams like this need to be scrapped, with different methods of assessing people. I'd also be interested in what other examinations imposed by gov'ts people have experience with.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
and exams like this need to be scrapped, with different methods of assessing people.

Such as?

I'll note in passing that I've only attempted to parallel park once in the 19-odd years since obtaining my driving licence, where it was vital that I prove my ability to parallel park.

Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
I think this is totally unfair

My guess is that the government's primary interest has very little to do with fairness. You might tend to think the government's saying, in effect, "If we're going to license no_prophet to run a sailboat with a 4 HP motor, then we need to make sure s/he knows what's what." But I think it's far more likely that the government's saying something more like "Look, if we're going to have to enforce licenses for sailing boats, then we need an exam that covers all the essentials because otherwise enforcement will be too complicated with all the different kinds of boats and a different license for each kind."

That's my lay-person's speculation.

Posted by the giant cheeseburger (# 10942) on :

I would also echo the question - when handing over a license to operate a two tonne killing machine (a car) how else are you to know that the person is a worthy recipient who is capable of operating it safely? How else can they prove it? Until this question can be answered in a satisfactory and logical manner then written and practical tests have to stay for things like driving, boating, firearms licenses and so on.

The issue of citizenship tests should, in my opinion, be a completely separate topic. It's a red herring to link these with the methods used to determine whether a person knows how to safely secure another vessel they may find drifting before granting them a boat license.

On the side issue, learning how to parallel park properly for the test was extremely useful for me. It opened up a whole world of opportunities to get a park closer to where I wanted to be. That so many people would rather drive straight past any spot where a bit of reversing will be needed is their loss and my gain.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

On the contrary, my dear cheeseburger. I find benefit in the extra walking!

PS If I lived in a different city than Canberra, I could well have a different mindset. There just aren't that many places here where it becomes significant.

[ 14. May 2012, 06:38: Message edited by: orfeo ]

Posted by the giant cheeseburger (# 10942) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
On the contrary, my dear cheeseburger. I find benefit in the extra walking!

PS If I lived in a different city than Canberra, I could well have a different mindset. There just aren't that many places here where it becomes significant.

It is significant on a 40 degree day when it's too hot to cycle into the city or up into the hills, or if I need to transport a load too big or heavy for the carrier rack on my bike.

I must confess at least a little bit of jealousy at Canberrans over their legendary cycle-friendly layout. But then I look at the weather in winter and feel thankful for Adelaide, even if the best cycle routes here are infested with signalled intersections and crossings.

[ 14. May 2012, 08:42: Message edited by: the giant cheeseburger ]

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

You just need to move from city to city seasonally. Come the working-from-home revolution and my jetsetting lifestyle, I'm going to come back to Canberra for March/April every year. It's bliss.

...have we derailed the thread enough yet?

I'm interested if someone can up with viable alternatives to exams, but in a lot of cases I can't just see it immediately. There are numerous situations where someone, somewhere basically has to accredit you as being competent so that the rest of the world is entitled to rely on the idea that you're accredited. And that means some type of assessment whether you have the relevant skills.

If the issue is merely the QUALITY of the assessment then... well, yeah, of course. But that's simply a case-by-case basis of whether the legislation sets the right requirements. They can certainly get out of date and need revision from time to time.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

You miss the point of the citizenship exam. A large minority of British people are racists. The Daily Mail tells them that the nasty wet government is letting all these dagos in and taking our jobs. The government wants to be Seen to be Doing Something. So it invents purposeless stupid exams, and deports a few dark-skinned Muslims, locks up kids in internment camps, and gets some of the blunter cabinet ministers to make deniable dog-whistle comments on TV shows. No fairness is intended or implied.

Posted by Doc Tor (# 9748) on :

They're not unfair. They are often stupid and blunt, for the reason already mentioned.

Here in the UK you need a separate licence to drive a moped, a motor cycle and a car, but if you have a motor cycle licence you also get a moped licence. I have a driving licence which also permits me to drive a minibus of 15 seats and under, but more modern car licences don't automatically confer this right. Whereas my dad has never taken a driving test, having got a waiver from the Army when he learnt to drive Bren Gun carriers just after the war.

More nuance would be good, but unenforceable. My kids could pass their test in a Fiat 500, and the next day be legally at the wheel of a Testarossa. So there'd be some scope in the driving test to limit the bhp or the engine size, as well as mandatory retaking of the test every 5 years.

Given the UK government's legendary inability to manage large IT projects, I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

We have a qualification here (the Elementary Food Hygiene certificate) which you need before you can do anything involving food for public consumption; you need it before you can give a child in the church creche a cup of juice from a carton and a biscuit straight from a packet. Any church activity which includes making a cup of tea requires the cup-of-tea maker to have the certificate. To get it you have to attend either a whole-day course, followed by exam, or three evening classes followed by exam. Without the certificate, you can hand a child a sealed packet of chocolate buttons, but you can't peel a banana for them. It's pretty much impossible to take part in any wider church activity without one.

I passed mine in 2004, and at the time I grudged the loss of the 3 evenings. But I do find myself doing things just a bit differently as a result. On reflection, I'd now say it was a good thing.

Posted by the long ranger (# 17109) on :

I don't think they're unfair, just sometimes overzealous. Given the number of idiotic people that think experience in a small boat gives them some of the necessary skills to go to sea in a yacht, I'd say that they're erring on the side of good sense in that respect.

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

quote:
I then saw in someone's ship profile about a British citizenship test. So I did a free practice exam. And saw that most Brits actually fail it like I did the first time.

Well, yes. I have said before that the citizenship test is testing the wrong things. You need a practical exam:

1. Take the candidates into a shop or railway station to buy something and observe their behaviour. If they wait their turn politely and confine themselves to glaring at anyone who pushes ahead of them in the queue (instead of punching their lights out or starting a loud argument), they're British.

2. Take the candidates for a picnic on a showery day. If it starts raining and they put their umbrellas up and carry on eating, they're British. If they don't have an umbrella and carry on eating anyway they are probably from the Western Isles or the Lake District.

If the citizenship test was really meant to identify people who are British, this is what it would do. However, as Ken said, it's just an extra bit of bureaucracy to appease the racists.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
We have a qualification here (the Elementary Food Hygiene certificate) which you need before you can do anything involving food for public consumption; you need it before you can give a child in the church creche a cup of juice from a carton and a biscuit straight from a packet. Any church activity which includes making a cup of tea requires the cup-of-tea maker to have the certificate. To get it you have to attend either a whole-day course, followed by exam, or three evening classes followed by exam. Without the certificate, you can hand a child a sealed packet of chocolate buttons, but you can't peel a banana for them. It's pretty much impossible to take part in any wider church activity without one.

I passed mine in 2004, and at the time I grudged the loss of the 3 evenings. But I do find myself doing things just a bit differently as a result. On reflection, I'd now say it was a good thing.

Posted by Galloping Granny (# 13814) on :

quote:
Originally posted by North East Quine:
We have a qualification here (the Elementary Food Hygiene certificate) which you need before you can do anything involving food for public consumption; you need it before you can give a child in the church creche a cup of juice from a carton and a biscuit straight from a packet. Any church activity which includes making a cup of tea requires the cup-of-tea maker to have the certificate. To get it you have to attend either a whole-day course, followed by exam, or three evening classes followed by exam. Without the certificate, you can hand a child a sealed packet of chocolate buttons, but you can't peel a banana for them. It's pretty much impossible to take part in any wider church activity without one.

I passed mine in 2004, and at the time I grudged the loss of the 3 evenings. But I do find myself doing things just a bit differently as a result. On reflection, I'd now say it was a good thing.

We were threatened with the same, but basic in-house stuff was eventually excepted, so we can bring biscuits and pour tea after church/bowls/croquet without having to qualify for a certificate. On the other hand, you can't sell your jam at a Farmers' Market without having your kitchen inspected and certificated.

As for the wee boat – I suppose the owner could theoretically become so passionate about life on the ocean wave that he graduated to larger vessels?
If only the people, often Polynesian, who go out fishing in a dinghy with no life jackets, locator beacons or even cell phones, and drown, had to pass some basic test, there would be quite a number still alive today.

GG

Lost connection – and for some reason the quote was posted but not my response. Sorry about that.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Doc Tor:
Given the UK government's legendary inability to manage large IT projects...

Actually the government used to be good at it when it did it itself - that is the work was all done by civil servants. It all went tits up when they semi-privatised everything and franchised it all out to their favourite large American companies, with the project managment and liason all done by incompetant overpaid undermotivated so-called "Consultants". It was the likes of Arthur Android and EDS who fucked up UK government IT. Not the civil servants.

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:
You miss the point of the citizenship exam. A large minority of British people are racists. The Daily Mail tells them that the nasty wet government is letting all these dagos in and taking our jobs. The government wants to be Seen to be Doing Something. So it invents purposeless stupid exams, and deports a few dark-skinned Muslims, locks up kids in internment camps, and gets some of the blunter cabinet ministers to make deniable dog-whistle comments on TV shows. No fairness is intended or implied.

But if all those racists were forced to take the same tests, and deported if they failed, we'd kill several birds with the same stone.

Orfeo: re: parallel parking. I'm assuming you mean by this what I would mean, parking parallel to the kerb in between other vehicles already parked similarly. In which case how could anyone get by for 19 years without doing it??? I'm baffled. It's the normal place to park unless you have a purpose built car park. Or a chauffeur to do it for you.

Posted by the giant cheeseburger (# 10942) on :

A lot of parking in Australian city centre streets is either 90° or 45° angled to the kerb, it's commonly accepted that the majority of workplaces will provide adequate off-street parking and planning permission for all new residential housing requires dedicated parking spaces. It's quite plausible that you can go for a long time without needing to do a parallel park, especially if you're okay with adding a few minutes to your trip walking between where you parked and where you're going.

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

Oh I see. Pond (or South Pacific) difference! Unbelievable to those of us on this crowded island.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by the giant cheeseburger:
...planning permission for all new residential housing requires dedicated parking spaces.

We're going the other way here. There are loads of new developments around where I live, construction going on everywhere and had been for about 15 years. One new estate has 700 flats and they had permission for 200 car parking spaces even though they wanted to provide more - there were complaints to the council that that was too many.

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

In our street most houses have drives big enough for one or two cars. The problem is that about half the households have two or more. Our neighbours park one of their cars in their drive, but the other two are left on the street - making it very difficult for us to get our (only) car into and out of our drive.

Posted by tclune (# 7959) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
In All Saints I posted about having bought an old and cheap sailboat, and that I had to do an exam to run the little auxiliary 4 HP motor. The exam made me learn completely irrelevant things, like how to use a VHF marine radio, how to anchor a 60 foot yacht, and pretty well how to drive a submarine (okay, not that, but everything else).

Question: did the license certify you for piloting a 60-foot yacht? If so, the problem wasn't that the exam asked irrelevant questions, but that they didn't tailor-make their licensing to precisely your craft. That hardly seems like a terrible outrage. If, OTOH, you were not being licensed to pilot sailboats up to 60 feet over expanses of water that would make radio communications important, then you may have a point.

--Tom Clune

[ 14. May 2012, 13:32: Message edited by: tclune ]

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Angloid:
Oh I see. Pond (or South Pacific) difference! Unbelievable to those of us on this crowded island.

Yep. Come to think of it, it's probably linked to Australia's unique and strange population profile: highly urbanised but with extremely low average population density. As cities have developed we have had the space to waste on car parking. I'm fully aware that if I ever attempted driving in many other countries, I'd be in deep trouble when it came to finding a place to stop! [Big Grin]

[ 14. May 2012, 13:15: Message edited by: orfeo ]

Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on :

If a standard automobile operators licence (driver licence) required the individual to know how to operate a moped, motorcycle, semi-trailer truck, grader and front end loader, then I would be able to agree that the boat licence is equivalent. The driver licence for passenger cars is the only exception I know of, it is aimed precisely at the tasks and responsibilities required.

Yes, I, and all Canadians with the BOAT Card can operate any size of "pleasure craft". So if I had the clams and a large enough slough to float it I could buy one.

I think the makers of such exams are bureaucrats with nothing to do.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
I think the makers of such exams are bureaucrats with nothing to do.

Well, no... for a start they have exams to make. [Biased]

But it's the logical end-result of whatever process there was to put laws in place that said "you need a licence for this". I'm not inclined to give myself a crash course in searching for Canadian law (not seen any for a while), but somewhere much further upstream there's been a decision that you need a licence, but also a decision (or non-decision) that's meant that the single kind of licence applies to a wide range of boats.

The bureaucrat who got the job of designing the exam could very possibly have had absolutely nothing to do with those previous decisions that determined the law. And in fact may well think those previous decisions are quite stupid. But getting those decisions changed might not be a simple process.

It should also be noted that sometimes those stupid decisions are made by Ministers, despite the bureaucrats trying to persuade the Minister it's not a good idea. I'm not saying there aren't stupid bureucrats, but the machinery of government has many places where stupidity can be introduced.

(And yes, I'm not exempting drafters from the stupidity. But when it comes to things like lists of criteria, we don't often question it unless it seems utterly stupid, such as... oh, I don't know, if a requirement for getting a boat licence was that you could compose a sonnet on a given topic.)

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Come to think of it, it's probably linked to Australia's unique and strange population profile: highly urbanised but with extremely low average population density.

Or, as a New Zealander once said, think of Australia as the Sahara Desert with half-a-dozen copies of Croydon round the edge.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

Oh and by the way: the fact that you are indeed now licensed to pilot a 60ft yacht demonstrates that the testing of your ability to pilot a 60ft yacht is NOT, in licensing terms, irrelevant.

It's just that you personally, at the moment, claim no desire to pilot a 60ft yacht.

This gets into interesting questions about:

(1) should the licensing be subdivided, thus leading large numbers of people to complain deeply about having to sit yet another exam when they decide to move up in the world to 60ft yachts, or

(2) should the law be aimed at your circumstances, regardless of the circumstances of anyone else, simply because the world revolves around your personal needs and the law-makers should have foreseen this, or

(3) are there in fact a LARGE number of people who have circumstances that are similar to yours.

I don't know. It's simply not self-evident to me whether you are a typical case or an outlier. I'd be leaving that decision to the 'policy' bureaucrats. [Razz]

I've just gone through a year of university that was quite frustrating and at times completely pointless for my circumstances, in order to meet the formal requirements for admission as a lawyer. But the pointlessness was for MY circumstances. A lot of the course clearly wasn't pointless for the people fresh out of law school who haven't had a decade in the work force and several years practical experience of working for clients like I have.

There is in fact a review going on at the moment of the requirements for admission as a lawyer here, in recognition that a lot of people are going into government work or some other field that doesn't bear close resemblance to the traditional model of a lawyer offering their services to the public. Perhaps in the future that would make it better for people with circumstances closer to my own. Meanwhile I just had to grit my teeth and get it over with.

...you did in fact get your licence, right? If you'd failed it because you didn't know what to do with that big yacht, THEN you'd really have something to get upset about.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by ken:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Come to think of it, it's probably linked to Australia's unique and strange population profile: highly urbanised but with extremely low average population density.
Or, as a New Zealander once said, think of Australia as the Sahara Desert with half-a-dozen copies of Croydon round the edge.

*Looks up Croydon*

Well, we've got FIVE places that are much bigger than that...

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

Croydon isn't a place, it's a state of being.

Posted by Sandemaniac (# 12829) on :

I have driven a steam traction engine (this one) on my ordinary car driving licence. If, however, I want to drive a steam roller, I have to take a steam roller driving test - even though driving a roller is almost exactly like driving a traction engine, which is almost exactly unlike driving a car. Make sense of that one...

AG

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

Now you are making me break the Tenth Commandment ("Thou shalt not covet a drive on thy neighbour's Traction Engine") as this driver experience certainly lies within easy striking distance of where I live!

[ 14. May 2012, 16:01: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]

Posted by Haydee (# 14734) on :

There is a wonderful thing here called Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) to take Orfeo's circumstances into account. However, due to severe incompetence in the (supposedly, actually they are as rude as f**k) civil service, it is easier, quicker & cheaper just to do the prescribed courses. Hence, despite having an MSc from a respectable UK university as well as being a mother tongue English speaker/writer, I find myself doing 'English for Academic Purposes' aimed at people with English as a 2nd/3rd/4th/whatever language.

Posted by Sober Preacher's Kid (# 12699) on :

Oh, this hoary old complaint. Sorry no_prophet, I'm not on your side.

I grew up on the Trent-Severn Waterway (in Ontario), the main route for pleasure craft between Lake Ontario and Georgian Bay and the Upper Lakes. My family has had homes on the Trent River in Ontario which is like living directly on a four-lane expressway for yachts and pleasure craft. no_prophet expressed the old thinking that any old person can operate a boat and a license is unnecessary.

Do you know how many idiots I have seen in boats? [Disappointed]

Motor Yachts passing dangerously near shore. Jet-skis operator that haven't a clue about safety and are completely ignorant of the Right of Way on the water. Insufficient lifejackets and other equipment shortages. Houseboats who go to anchor for the night, don't set the anchor properly and who then into danger.

Do you know how many boats we rescued at my cottage for mechanical breakdowns or gas shortages? Lots.

The idiocy on the water needed to end, that's why the Federal Government acted.

Speaking of radios, on Lake Ontario it is very, very easy to take a small craft out of sight of land. Salmon fishing boats do it often, without radio they'd be very isolated. Maybe you can't go out of sight of land but others certainly can.

Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on :

SPK - you have explained much. The problem is Ontario! Ontario actually has people with big boats and boat traffic problems. I did not know that. This reminds me of the ill-fated gun registry, where Toronto has problems with gun violence.

The average western Canadian, if they have a motor boat, it is small, they launch it for the day, there are maybe 4 other boats on the lake and they are either fishing or towing children on tubes. There are no government docks, no marker buoys, no channels, and very few cabins (that's what cottages are called out here).

Thus you have explained it well.

Posted by Sober Preacher's Kid (# 12699) on :

Ontario has the Rideau and Trent-Severn Waterways, plus the Great Lakes.

Under the Constitution Act, 1867 Admiralty Law (laws relating to shipping, navigation and vessels, both on inland waters, coastal waters and high seas) is under Federal jurisdiction. BC has its sea coast and Lake Okanagan. Manitoba has Lake Winnipeg and Lake Manitoba. Quebec has the St. Lawrence and Lake Champlain which is tied in with the Champlain Canal to the Hudson River. So pretty much everyone except Saskatchewan and Alberta had a direct interest in pleasure craft licensing and improving water safety.

Of course with your national license, you can go to Lake Okanagan and rent a houseboat or try your hand sailing in BC waters. Nothing is going to stop you. The number of people in your situation is actually rather small on a national scale.

Posted by Full of Chips (# 13669) on :

Perhaps a law should be introduced making it compulsory to pass an exam before being able to set competency exams. If enacted immediately, no-one would be competent to set such an exam, hence no more competency exams. Problem solved!

[ 14. May 2012, 19:26: Message edited by: Full of Chips ]

Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sober Preacher's Kid:
So pretty much everyone except Saskatchewan and Alberta had a direct interest in pleasure craft licensing and improving water safety.

Of course with your national license, you can go to Lake Okanagan and rent a houseboat or try your hand sailing in BC waters. Nothing is going to stop you. The number of people in your situation is actually rather small on a national scale.

This is it exactly. The east decides something and has no idea that it annoys westerners. Manitoba has other waters, more used as I have described, like Sask and Alberta's. I'll give you BC.

Posted by Sober Preacher's Kid (# 12699) on :

Yes, it's a giant Eastern Conspiracy. Except it's the Federal Government that regulates navigation. And Ontario does not have a majority in the House of Commons. [Roll Eyes]

And 60% of Manitoba consists of the City of Winnipeg and Lakes Winnipeg, Manitoba and Winnipegosis are large bodies of water like Lake Chaplain or Lake St. Clair. So in Manitoba it's really about Winnipeggers being idiots up at the lake, just like in Ontario it's Torontonians being idiots up at the lake in the Kawarthas or Muskoka.

Anyway if Albertans haven't bothered to take their Tory Majority out for a spin it's their own fault.

Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on :

C'mon, you know we all really love Ontario and Toronto particularly. [Big Grin]

I do think the problem is a too broad of an expectation of regulation and exams with the BOAT card.

As for the other forms of regulation and exams, they suffer from the same problems. There is something bad happening when they let business school grads infused with quality assurance and assembly line ideas into handling human-related services. It would be so much easier if we were all the same. Except we're not.

Posted by orfeo (# 13878) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Full of Chips:
Perhaps a law should be introduced making it compulsory to pass an exam before being able to set competency exams. If enacted immediately, no-one would be competent to set such an exam, hence no more competency exams. Problem solved!

Um, no, because you still have lots of people who have to PASS competency exams, but there are no competency exams available to sit. [Razz]

Posted by Fr Weber (# 13472) on :

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:

quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
and exams like this need to be scrapped, with different methods of assessing people.
Such as?

I'll note in passing that I've only attempted to parallel park once in the 19-odd years since obtaining my driving licence, where it was vital that I prove my ability to parallel park.

I think this depends on where you are. I have to parallel park all the time.

The boat license no_prophet describes is absurdly comprehensive. Maybe it would work better broken down into a number of more specific tests--but those, I'm sure, would contain their own doses of useless arcana.

Posted by Justinian (# 5357) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no_prophet:
If a standard automobile operators licence (driver licence) required the individual to know how to operate a moped, motorcycle, semi-trailer truck, grader and front end loader, then I would be able to agree that the boat licence is equivalent. The driver licence for passenger cars is the only exception I know of, it is aimed precisely at the tasks and responsibilities required.

Yes, I, and all Canadians with the BOAT Card can operate any size of "pleasure craft". So if I had the clams and a large enough slough to float it I could buy one.

I think the makers of such exams are bureaucrats with nothing to do.

You have it precisely backwards. If they were bureaucrats with nothing to do then some of them would get bored and you'd get the twenty eight separate vehicle licenses you apparently want. And a number of boaties would have to take fourteen separate tests to be able to pilot the boats they want to sail.

no_prophet not having a license tailored specifically to your boat is not evidence that bureaucrats have nothing to do. It's absolutely the reverse. It's bureaucrats having enough to do (like run the country and keep pesticides from being used as food preservatives) that they don't have time to look at your specific boat and certify you on it and no other. Cry me a river.

The reason that a specific driving test can be targetted at cars is that there are literally millions of Canadians who want to drive cars and no other vehicles. Bureaucrat time spent keeping millions of Canadians happy is a decent investment. There might be thousands of people who will want to sail a large sailing boat and who will never want to do anything with larger boats or radios (which would put them through the massive inconvenience of a second exam under your system). But I doubt it's more than a couple of thousand at most. And as it's only a very minor inconvenience, overworked bureaucrats have much better things to worry about.

And @Doc Tor and ken, almost every time the public sector tries negotiating with the private, the public sector loses. The reason is simple. When the public sector negotiates with itself, the focus is on getting the work done. The work gets done and then sorting out who pays is almost an afterthought. The private sector cares about money, first and foremost - and so will take any edge they can get. Which means that the public sector is walking into a game of Prisoner's Dilemma on a very heavy cooperate strategy as against the private sector defecting.

Edit: And no, this isn't to defend the British Citizenship Test. That's more pandering to the Daily Heil as mentioned above.

[ 15. May 2012, 12:59: Message edited by: Justinian ]

Posted by no_prophet (# 15560) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Justinian:
Edit: And no, this isn't to defend the British Citizenship Test. That's more pandering to the Daily Heil as mentioned above.

You cannot have it both ways.

What really happen, to make the parallel properly, is that before allowing any citizen to vote in any election, they have to pass an exam, like on of the citizenship tests.

And, no, 28 different tests for boats are not required. Probably just 3: small craft designed for day fishing and towing the the family on tubes. These are usually less than 16 feet in length. Boats designed for commercial purposes, fishing, tourism. Boats with overnight cabins, i.e. a big yacht class.

Posted by cheesymarzipan (# 9442) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Fr Weber:

quote:
Originally posted by orfeo:
Such as?

I'll note in passing that I've only attempted to parallel park once in the 19-odd years since obtaining my driving licence, where it was vital that I prove my ability to parallel park.
I think this depends on where you are. I have to parallel park all the time.

I was in a bus today that had to parallel park!

Posted by Alogon (# 5513) on :

Setting the bars high for aspirants to a status or privilege makes it attractive and gives those enjoying it a sense of pride in workmanship. Unless the motive in writing the exam is actually to discourage citizens from gaining access, let them ask those questions that you think irrelevant or foolish. The tendency of democracy to dumb you-name-it down is much in evidence these days, and may yet be its undoing. It just encourages frivolous dabbling, usually very temporary before the person moves on to some other casual interest. Any trend in the other direction will get no opposition from me, unless there are ulterior motives such as racism.

cf. conversion to Judaism, admission to Fidonet, amateur radio exams which (presumably) still require competence in Morse Code. The insiders actually have a burning desire to attract outsiders, but part of their strategy is never to let them know it.

[ 15. May 2012, 19:07: Message edited by: Alogon ]

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