41,850 nursing grads take exam

Starting today, 41,850 examinees will take the two-day licensure test for nurses, the second to be given this year by the Professional Regulation Commission.

PRC chairman Leonor Rosero said they are considering delaying by three hours the start of the board examinations nationwide because of the havoc caused by typhoon "Reming" in the Bicol Region.

"Nothing is final as of now," she said. "We have to wait for the report of our test paper custodian tomorrow morning. The situation there will be assessed."

Rosero said if there should be a delay, it would apply to all examination centers across the country, not just in the Bicol Region.

"The test must start simultaneously," she said. "We can’t delay it in Bicol and then start on time in other places."

Rosero said they are administering Tests 1, 2 and 4 today, while Test 3 and 5 would be given tomorrow.

"I think some of them are already abroad, while others opted to prepare more so they will take the June (2007) test," she said.

"Others learned that they needed to re-take (the test) late."

Rosero said around 1,200 of the 1,687 examinees from the June batch who have been stricken out from the list of passers are expected to take tomorrow’s test.

The 1,687 examinees are those who initially failed the June licensure test, but when the PRC had invalidated the leaked questions in Test 3 and 5 and recomputed the grades, they passed, she added.

The Court of Appeals upheld the original grades, prompting the PRC to remove them from the list of examinees, she said.

Rosero said safety measures have been put in place to prevent a repeat of last June’s leakage.

"The (June) leakage did not come from the PRC, but from the board of examiners," she said.

She is confident that, as in June, the PRC would not be the cause of such anomaly, Rosero added.

A PRC fact-finding committee and the National Bureau of Investigation have implicated two former members of the Board of Nursing (BON) in leaking out parts of Tests 3 and 5.

Rosero said the new set of BON examiners is now "cautious" because of what happened in the June examinations

As a precautionary measure, the test questions prepared by the five examiners were encoded in the installation disks protected by their own passwords, she added.

Rosero said after encoding, the examiners made a template that computer programmers used to install the test questions in the PRC’s data bank.

The examiners have also been "quarantined" since Monday last week in the private printing press where the test questionnaires were printed, she added.

The examiners would be released from quarantine an hour after the last examinee completes the test tomorrow, Rosero said.