Trick Questions On Ongoing Education Tests - Why, What's the Purpose for That?

Over the years I've become quite the opponent of ongoing education certification testing. You see, I am concerned because many of these ongoing education tests are required for people in business to keep their professional licenses and certifications. If they fail these tests they lose their license, their livelihood, and the way they make their living. On one hand we are worried that people may default on their mortgages, ruin their credit rating, or end up on the unemployment lines, and then on the other hand we are doing everything we can to trick them with these tests question so that they fail the test.

Why does this happen you ask? Well, there are a number of reasons, some of them quite insidious actually. You see, the companies that administer these tests lobby the government to certify their courses and tests as the professional license standard. Then these companies make money off individuals in the industry which are required to take these ongoing education courses, and then take the test when they are completed. If the test is too easy and too many people pass, then the regulators think the test is hard enough, and if everyone passes the first time, the companies can't charge people to retake the tests.

Rather than asking for more information, these companies try to make the test hard by using trick questions. This is totally unfair to someone who does not have a good use of the English language. That happens all the time. Many professionals may speak a foreign language, but their clientele also speaks a foreign language, and they are serving a niche just by having that certification and servicing those customers. We make ballots for voting in multiple languages and make it very easy for these people to vote in their own language, but not when it comes to professional testing.

When people's livelihoods are at stake, the last thing we should do is treat it like a big joke, and make trick questions in an attempt to make the test harder than it needs to be. You see, either we want the people to know the information, or we don't. If we really care that they learn the information, then we can ask the questions without using double negatives, or grammatically incorrect sentences. You see my point yet? It is a travesty that we've let this go on so long. Some of the test questions do not have a correct answer if you read them in a grammatically correct way; that is if you actually could in many cases.

Other questions don't even make sense, and they have no business being on the test at all. If we can't trust the people who are creating the tests, then how can we even trust the concept of continuing or ongoing education? Something needs to change, we need to reduce regulation with fewer of these requirements so people can actually work and make money, rather than spending 25% of their time studying for tests which are carefully engineered to try to get them to fail based on trick questions. There is no honor in that. Please consider all this and think on it.