Old boys’ club comes under fire - Land surveyors’ exam fails sniff test as students hint at corruption
Published:Monday | November 2, 2020 | 12:10 AM
Judana Murphy/Gleaner Writer
The organisation empowered to certify Jamaica’s land surveyors has been cast as a shadowy old boys’ club and the examination process criticised as corrupt and lacking transparency.
Calls are growing for sweeping reforms at the Land Surveyors Board, which appears to exercise autonomous powers and has been condemned for commissioning limited numbers of experts who depend on, and largely benefit from, the labour of apprentices.
That complaint has been levelled by current and former apprentices, among them Student X, who says the journey to becoming a commissioned land surveyor has been riddled with untold roadblocks and disappointment.
A graduate of the College of Arts, Science and Technology, now the University of Technology, Jamaica, X has a career spanning more than two decades.
The student surveyor, who requested anonymity for fear of being penalised, has lambasted the examination body for a lack of transparency in the administration of its assessment and for unfairly rewarding certification to students who have not passed the test.
“It’s not about pass or fail. It’s about how they feel about you,” X told The Gleaner.
“I want to realise my dream of becoming a commissioned land surveyor. After spending so many years in the profession, running up and down through all the hills and valleys of Jamaica, I have been left to stagnate. I have been stuck for countless years without promotion,” X lamented.
Candidates must satisfy the examiners in the two-part examination – oral and practical – to be commissioned.
X sat the exams for the first time in 2015 and subsequently made failed attempts at either component. Students are left in limbo because the exact scores received for the exams are never disclosed, as the format of the results is ‘pass or fail’.
“For the oral exam, they don’t have a stenographer or anyone taking notes, so it’s what the examiner says against your word,” X said.
The experienced student surveyor is appealing for an examination body independent of the Land Surveyors Board to administer the tests.
The lament by student surveyors like X centres around their work being used by their superiors in official land titling without concomitant reward.
Making reference to the plan X submitted for the practical in the last sitting, X said: “This plan has been approved. They are now using it to issue titles and I have not made any changes. If my plan can be used to issue titles, then it means, therefore, that I have not failed the exam,” the student said.
X was given a pass for only the oral section.
The student requested an appeal of two examination results and was informed in a letter from the board, dated July 21, 2017, that “... there is no right of appeal of the examination results by the Land Surveyors Act”.
X reasoned that the lack of fairness accounts for the high attrition rate of student surveyors and the lack of interest by youth in pursuing the qualifying component at the university level.
X revealed that some students play an integral role in the checking of exam plans and have concluded that their prospects are limited because of systemic irregularities.
The National Land Agency’s (NLA) website says there are 107 commissioned land surveyors who have been issued with a practising certificate by the Land Surveyors Board of Jamaica for the year ending December 31, 2020.
A former student surveyor, *Bob Builder, told The Gleaner that inequities in the exam process drove him to resign from the NLA after five failed attempts at certification.
Builder had experience vetting the plans for practical exams and recalled one occasion when he could not complete the check because “a good chunk of the computations” was missing.
He reported the challenges to his superior, who reportedly told him to make a note of it on the submission. When the results were released, that student was among the few who passed and it was revealed that he was also the son of a commissioned land surveyor.
During his more than-two-decade career at the NLA, Builder produced numerous plans that have become deposited at the titles office, but was barred from official consideration as a commissioned land surveyor.
“Last year alone, about four or five surveyors migrated. They are frustrated with the system; they see that the system is corrupt and they just can’t be bothered,” Builder lamented.
He continued: “There has to be an independent arm doing the exam. The system is corrupt and it is highly managed. They don’t want the system to become saturated, so they sabotage.”
Considering the challenges that exist, Builder believes the exam needs to be moved to the institutional level.
Conflicts of interest arise because increased numbers of commissioned surveyors crowd out space in the market in which examiners are major players.
“I remember one surveyor looked at a friend of mine some time ago and said, ‘Why should I train you to become my competitor’?” he recalled.
Joe Black*, a commissioned land surveyor who sat the examinations seven times before he was successful at both the oral and practical component, corroborated the claims of both current and former student surveyors.
“The exams are not equitably or fairly adjudicated. It’s on the basis of who you are, whose child you are, or whose student you are.The year I changed my principal, I passed the exams,” he said.
Black’s first attempt at certification was in the early 2000s. He believes that he passed both components but was failed by examiners for unexplained reasons.
Calls were made to seven random commissioned land surveyors on the NLA’s listing, one of whom, a male, was successful on the first shot, a male on the second attempt and a woman on the third try.
Another woman declined to comment while the remaining calls went to voicemail.
Black believes the examination should be a “blind system” where students are assigned candidate numbers, which means that examiners would not know whose paper they are marking.
“What is happening is that you have judge, jury and executioner being the same people. The surveyors meet and decide if you pass or fail, and then the board ratifies it,” he explained.
Section 11 of the Land Surveyors Act states that the Land Surveyors Board is “responsible for the management and control of all examinations and professional education”, including the appointment of an examiner to hold a final test.
The Gleaner submitted questions to the chairman of the Land Surveyors Board, Dr Glendon Newsome, about the alleged irregularities and lack of transparency in the administration of the exam, the yearly success rate and the format of the results, among other issues.
Newsome did not answer queries on the substantive issues.
The board chairman is the senior director at the NLA’s Survey and Mapping Division and is also the principal to whom NLA student surveyors are assigned.
In an emailed response, Newsome shared three documents that did not provide any clarity on the matters in question and referred The Gleaner to the act.
Black said that it is imperative for students to know exactly how they performed in the examinations – areas of strength and weakness, as well as percentage scores, opposed to pass or fail.
“The profession is an old boys’ club that is finally letting in some women. Most of the time, it doesn’t come down to how good you are, what you know, or what you put on the plate,” he said.
About five per cent of commissioned surveyors are women, records show.
Black shared that in the last few years, there has been an increase in the number of students who pass the examinations – about four or five per year – but in previous years, it was one or two.
“Sometimes the two persons who pass are repeat people. It is very rare that you have somebody who goes one time and gets the certification. If I wasn’t mentally strong, I would have been broken. It can get to you. You wonder, ‘What am I doing wrong’?” Black revealed.
* Real name withheld.