On accreditation standards, competence assessments and gate-keeping : Houston, we have a problem!

This piece is a commentary on an important article, “An examination of accreditation standards between Australian and US/Canadian doctoral programs in clinical psychology”. The commentary complements and extends the original article by providing additional data on clinical supervision and examination requirements for clinical psychology training in the US and Australia. Indications that end-of-placement supervisor assessments are less reliable than expected, extremely low fail-rates during training, and the absence of a comprehensive and rigorous final examination for Registration with AOPE together constitute a serious concern and raise the possibility of a compromised competence assessment system. Inadequate assessment matters especially in the context of reduced clinical supervision requirements within the new accreditation standards.