Going to Prison...?

practice management
1

Video: “What is Licensure”
time code: 5:54
Erroneous statement: “The licensing Board… may decide that the situation warrants disciplinary action, which may include fines, …or even imprisonment.”

State licensing boards do not have the authority to imprison anyone. Ironically, this is almost an example of the very thing under consideration in this part of the video - falsely claiming a status which is regulated by law. Of course this is not NCARB making this claim for itself, but B.S. making the claim in a video. I’m getting a bit concerned about this. If this information is false - what else in this program is false? Not being able to be confident in information content means I have a harder time wanting to commit it to memory. You are in the business of disseminating facts - it is what you literally bank on. You can’t afford to allow things in that are blatantly untrue. It is really damaging to the relationship you are trying to build with new students. I will now be doing fact checking on this course work more than I would like.

2

Hi @aidenjh thanks for writing in.

We, of course, take the accuracy and completeness of our content very seriously, and we always look into our content when folks write in with questions. We’re sorry to hear that you’re concerned with our content and I hope that this response sheds some light on our overall thought process about ARE content, as well as this topic.

I can speak to this specific content because I wrote the script. The potential disciplinary actions we’re talking about here come from the Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, 15th Edition, page 62, top of the page. This book is an official resource for the exam - meaning that when volunteers write ARE questions, it’s one of the books they use to justify the correct answer to the question. That said, the likelihood of facing a question about this on the ARE is pretty slim - maybe one question out of 65 of the PcM exam, if that. It’s not a super important topic, so we cover it briefly in this video.

What we specifically say is that licensing boards “may decide that the situation warrants disciplinary action”, then we go on to list several potential disciplinary actions, ending with "or even imprisonment." We don’t say that licensing boards are some sort of quasi-judicial body that can imprison folks because that’s not true - as you point out. They can’t. They can, in egregious situations, refer a case to the attorney general, who can prosecute criminally. If it comes down to this, imprisonment is a potential consequence. We don’t go into this amount of detail in the actual video because it’s not really important for the purposes of the ARE, and we try to keep our content concise and focused on topics you can expect on the exam, while still being holistic. As you can imagine, it’s a tough balance.

Obviously egregious infractions that could result in serious disciplinary action are super rare, and therefore probably beyond the scope of the ARE. We’re not implying that you may be imprisoned for calling yourself an ‘architectural designer’ at a cocktail party - but I could see facing potential jail time if an architect (or someone pretending to be one) intentionally defrauds the public for an extended period of time, or if they act with complete disregard for laws/rules and that action results in serious health consequences or death. I did a quick google search and found a case where a California architect was sentenced to one year in prison for knowingly and willingly directing the installation of an exterior fireplace indoors, which resulted in a firefighter passing away. Had a state board been the first to hear of this case, they likely would refer it to the attorney general for criminal prosecution, which is what happened there.

Thanks again for being a valued member and good luck in your studies!

3

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. That is confidence building. You are right that there are consequences to architectural malpractice which include jail time, and I think you are also right to include this in your discussion.

The concern I have is that, if you aren’t careful in how you word a gloss of a complicated subject, you could leave an inaccurate impression of the overall scope of the subject under consideration. In this case, it would be very natural for a candidate to come away with the impression that a licensing board had the capability of enforcing incarceration.

I think the real danger here is not so much that a candidate’s chances of passing the ARE or of practicing architecture would be injured by this understanding, but that a candidate’s confidence in the accuracy of your work would begin to erode - and this uncertainty and anxiety both impedes the natural dynamics of memorization and also causes unnecessary extra work on the part of the candidate to verify claims made in the videos and lecture slides. Candidates, as you are uniquely positioned to know, are under intense time pressures, and we crave accurate and efficiently organized information to use our time wisely. If we become unsettled enough by casual inaccuracies to begin second-guessing everything in the course, then the value of our time is massively reduced.

Also, there is the matter of just reporting the errors and responding to this kind of feedback loop, which takes time. I am clocked out of my timer while composing this response, for example, and I have tons of things that need this time right now. I hope you can understand why I am taking this time out of my day to impress upon you how deeply important it is to listen to your customers.

4

I’m glad I could help re-instill some confidence in our materials and I appreciate you writing in about them. We definitely take listening to our members very seriously, and that’s one of the points of this community - to encourage healthy and respectful discussions about ARE content.

We hope that our members will write in whenever they’re confused about our material or when they think we may be incorrect about something. We look into each case and of course, if we’re wrong or could say something in a better way, we update our material.

We hope that our members don’t jump to the conclusion that all of our content is flawed because they think they found an error or two - let’s chat about it first like we did here! A simple way to avoid this line of thinking is to consider our pass rates (86% for PcM compared to the national average of 53%) and the fact that we’ve helped tens of thousands of candidates pass their exams. If our content was full of errors, these things couldn’t be true.