In a bold pushback against mounting certification costs, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists is eyeing the creation of a more affordable state-specific licensing exam for budding psychologists, challenging a pricey new national test that's stirring up financial and professional angst, as reported by the Texas Tribune.
The board's move, which would pivot away from the Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards (ASPPB) recently introduced $450 skills assessment, comes after years of employing a national exam since 1965, however, if Texas skips on this new mandate, psychologists in the state could lose their eligibility to use the current exam, with John Bielamowicz, the presiding member of the state psychologists’ licensing board, describing the new skills test requirement as "a negotiation tactic" in an interview with the Texas Tribune.
Psychologists in Texas are already shelling out for a series of steep fees to get licensed—upwards of $800 for the knowledge exam, $210 for a jurisprudence test, $320 for an oral exam, and another $340 during their 3,500 hours of mandatory supervised work, with the proposed addition of the skills test only raising the financial hurdle; Sarah Lorenz, a Dallas mental health counselor, detailed to the board that she "spent close to $9,000 trying to pass the first (knowledge test)," a statement underscored by the KXAN News.
The Lone Star State is acutely aware of its draught of mental health professionals, with 251 of its 254 counties partially or wholly bearing the federal designation of "mental health professional shortage areas," Texas is facing a stark challenge in a state where an estimated 5 million are uninsured, compounding the urgency for a cadre of accessible and diverse mental health providers, especially when more than half of Texas' inhabitants are Hispanic, yet the provider population leans predominantly white with less than a fifth offering services in languages other than English, highlighted in the KXAN report.
While adherents to the new exam highlight the necessity of a skills assessment to align psychologists with other health providers, critics on the Texas board decried the addition as redundant, claiming there have been no significant ethics or preparedness complaints from current practitioners with Ryan Bridges, a board member, calling it "a solution looking for a problem that also doubles the expense of test takers." The question of whether the test accurately gauges clinical skills or merely adds obstacles, especially to applicants of diverse backgrounds, remains a pressing concern that Texas remains poised to address.
