EDITORIAL - No more exam leaks

The Professional Regulation Commission has dismissed reports that questions in the forthcoming Nursing Licensure Examination have been leaked. A member of the PRC’s Board of Nursing, reacting to reports that some of the questions had been leaked to examinees in Baguio, Cebu and Surigao, said earlier this week that the board was still finalizing the test questions.

Let’s hope this is true and the PRC is on top of the situation. The last time a scandal erupted in the conduct of the nursing board exams, even the innocent had to retake the test. And the country’s nurses, including those working or applying for jobs overseas, were affected by the loss of confidence in the qualifications of the Filipino nurse.

Despite that scandal, nursing has remained one of the most popular courses. Nearly 90,000 graduates are expected to take the nursing board exam on Nov. 29 and 30. The board exam will reportedly have five test segments, with 100 questions per segment. For every 100 questions, 500 will be encoded into a machine, which will then pick the 100 questions at random. The nursing board explained that this was one of the reasons why a leak in the questions was not possible. But those 500 questions will still be encoded by humans. The use of a machine for random selection does not preclude the possibility that some of the questions may actually get out, though there is no guarantee that they will actually be included in the exam.

The PRC has vowed to do everything to make the forthcoming exams tamper-proof and leak-proof. This is even more important amid the global economic slowdown, which could mean the loss of jobs or a freeze in the hiring of nurses. Even before the financial meltdown, demand for new nurses was already dropping significantly, and thousands of Filipino nurses could not find jobs. The last thing the country needs at this time is another exam scandal that will erode the competitiveness of the country’s nurses.