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My wife received her certification as a pharmacy technician yesterday. It is a good thing, demonstrating not only that she has developed a marketable, "practical" skill set, but that she has done so in a way that has been recognized and endorsed by an outside agency. I am happy for her, of course (not least because she is supposed to get a raise from doing so), but, being prone to thought and question as I am, I find myself moving along lines of inquiry that may come off as casting aspersion on what my wife has done--and even some of what I have done. For I began to think about credentialing, and, as I have made much of the credentials I hold, it is a topic with which I find myself quite concerned.

The idea with credentialing, of course, is that an outside agent certifies that a certain level of performance has been achieved by the recipient of the credential. This often takes the form of passing a specified test, whether of practical skills as in the case of martial arts instruction (in my experience either x number of techniques or x set of techniques) or of knowledge and its manipulation (as in my comprehensive exams or the exams I give to my own students). The idea is that recourse to an outside agency prevents--or at least inhibits--personal concerns from influencing the decision to credential or not to credential (with apologies to the Bard). The outside certification is supposed to ensure that only proficiency, not sympathy or other concerns that do not bear in on the thing being credentialed, decides the matter. And the possession of the credential itself is supposed to serve as evidence in support of assertions of that proficiency; it is supposed to make lying about capabilities more difficult. Each is meritorious in itself.

Each, however, presents problems. Certification by testing tends towards the dreaded phenomenon of "teaching to the test," going no further in terms of instruction than that which is known or assumed to be on the certification exam. Outside agencies are not less subject to corruption than local ones, and the certifiers remain people who may well have their own agendas and biases. Too, the issuer of the credential may not be in the best position to know what proficiency actually is. And there is no guarantee that those who have been certified continue to merit that certification. To return to earlier examples, having attained to shodan does not mean that the artist continues the practice necessary to retain appropriate skills, and having passed one set of exams does not mean the knowledge and insight needed to do so remains. The world offers many instances of people who ought to know better, who have the certifications and credentials to argue that they do know better, acting in ways that prove they do not know better. I have known martial artists who should not hold their ranks and know many scholars who ought not to be. And I doubt I am alone.

I am not calling for an end to credentialing. I would hate to think that mine do not matter, after all, and I remain convinced that the benefits of the process are worthwhile. But perhaps rethinking how it is done would be worth doing.