Angelite Nurses

Exam checkers to go on quarantine Thursday

By Veronica Uy
INQUIRER.net
Last updated 02:54pm (Mla time) 08/15/2007

MANILA, Philippines -- A flurry of text messages has been circulating that the results of the June 2007 nursing licensure examinations will be out this week, but the Board of Nursing (BoN) on Wednesday denied this and said the results will be released toward the end of August.

According to the text messages, the results will be released at the offices of the Professional Regulation Commission on August 15, on the Internet on August 16, and through newspapers on August 17.

“Good luck sa atin [to us] and please pass. Thanks,” the message also said. Some messages even mention a passing rate.

The editorial office of INQUIRER.net, which regularly posts the results of professional licensure exams, also fielded several calls Wednesday evening asking if the nursing board results were out.

But in a phone interview, BoN member Dean Marco Sto. Tomas said there is no truth to the text messages. “This is only raising the anxiety level of the examinees and their parents. As we’ve stated in a letter to the deans of nursing colleges, the results will come out toward the end of August,” he said.

Sto. Tomas said the board will actually go on a second self-imposed quarantine starting Thursday, August 16, emerging only after the board results are released.

A few days before the June 2007 exams, all the board members also went on quarantine.

These precautions, he said, are being taken after last year’s exams were mired in controversy when it was found that portions of the test were leaked to examinees enrolled with some review centers.

The answers by the almost 80,000 nursing graduates who took the exam two months ago have all been read by the PRC’s ocular media readers and stored in the computers, he said.

Sto. Tomas said that when he and fellow BoN members go into quarantine, the correct answers will be encoded into the PRC computers.

“Right now, nobody -- not even members of the board like myself -- can say that these many passed or these many failed because there are still no correct answers against which the computers will form a basis for saying that so many passed or so many failed. Also at this stage, the takers have still not been identified,” he said, explaining that as of now, the examinees are only known by a bar code number.

Only when the computers have matched the actual answers with the correct answers and the names of the examinees with their assigned identification numbers can the results be known.

But even at this stage, those who pass or fail will still not be known. Sto. Tomas said the BoN would still have to determine the mean based on the results.

“The mean will determine the passing grade for this exam. But the board would still have to deliberate on this passing grade because we might consider adjustments if the highest is too high and the lowest is too low…After this final deliberation, there is still one last stage we have to undergo. We take 50 sheets at random and check manually if the computer has done the matching correctly,” he said.

He said some 13,000 nursing graduates retook the exam, either because of the CGFNS ruling or the Supreme Court decision when the controversy reached the high tribunal. In the case of those identified by the Supreme Court, he said, the BoN will release the results of their exam.

Labor Secretary Arturo Brion will release the results of the rest of those who retook the board exam.

“Hopefully this would bring back integrity to the Philippine nursing licensure exams,” he said.

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