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Comment by metalspot | Hacker News Reader

if a job has specific knowledge and skills requirements then it needs to have an objective test that people pass to be able to do the job.

that is the only way to eliminate the systemic discrimination that the university system and degree requirements propagate.

almost all serious jobs already have objective skills tests and licensing requirements for employment: doctors, lawyers, financial services, heavy equipment operators, etc, etc, etc.

adding degree requirements on top of those licensing requirements cannot possibly add any additional benefit but it is obviously discriminatory against many marginalized groups.

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I'm 100% on-board with requiring an actual med school degree for my doctor rather than a skills-based test.

I find this to be a slightly weird argument. Med school degrees do have varying levels of quality. Moreover, in the US, you cannot be licensed without residency -- residency is practicing under supervision, essentially a skills-based set of active tests. Then after the residency program many physicians go for board certification, which is additional study and tests (run by a professional cabal that makes a ton of money off of questions about beaver fever, for instance).

Well, anyhow, you already do require skills-based assessment if you are seeing licensed physicians in the US. They don't let ppl practice with only book learning.

Hard agree, I'd rather not leetcode-ify* the health system. Nor do I want to see swaths of businesses dedicated to cracking the medical leetcode interview.

*because it really feels as if some companies translate leetcode skills to actual skills

getting a degree is nothing more than passing a series of tests over a period of time. medical licensing is residency, exams, board certifications, etc. it is all tests. the question is who is setting the rules for those tests and whether or not private corporations get to charge you 100s of thousands of dollars to take them.

medicine is way out of my field, so i don't have personal experience and can only go on what i have read, but i would guess that it is a lot like most other highly specialized fields: pre-med is a waste other than basic bio/chem, medical school is mostly information you will never use, residency is where you learn how to actually do the job, and then you get into a specialty and learn that specialty, and what you learn for your specialty is the only thing you really use.

How would a degree be a stronger signal of competency than a standardized skills-based test?

GP seemed to be suggesting replacing the degree requirement with a skills-based test.

For doctors, I'm perfectly comfortable requiring both and do not accept the replacement of a degree with a skills-based test.

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