Nursing exam flunker says she, too, got test leaks

By Alcuin Papa
Inquirer
Last updated 05:30pm (Mla time) 08/25/2006

ANOTHER nursing student has confirmed having obtained a set of the leaked test questions in the last nursing licensure examinations even as a key witness, nursing student Pamela Ortega, recanted her testimony on the leakage the other day.

In her July 28 testimony before the Board of Nursing (BON), a copy of which was furnished the Inquirer by the Professional Regulation Commission, Christie Makabenta said a friend gave her a set of review materials from the Inress Review Center, owned by former Philippine Nursing Association president George Cordero.

The review materials, Makabenta said, contained questions and answers to Test 5 (psychiatric nursing) that appeared in the last board exam.Makabenta, an employee of the Asian Hospital’s financial counselor’s office, said she took her nursing degree from the Laguna Northwestern College in San Pedro, Laguna. She took the licensure exam on June 11 and 12 but failed.

Makabenta said she enrolled for review classes at the Pentagon Review Center. She said that on June 10, a friend who was reviewing with Inress gave her a thick folder with 500 questions for Test 5.

But she claimed to have been so overwhelmed by the volume of the materials, she decided there was no time to go over them.

After the exams, she leafed through the materials and discovered that they contained the very questions that came out in the board exams.

Makabenta, who regretted not having studied the review materials, felt better for it after the leakage scandal erupted. But she has since been bothered at being in possession of the materials and decided to turn them over to the BON.

She said she was so nervous she did not even stay long enough to sign the report of the incident which the BON submitted to the PRC.

PRC Commissioner Renato Valdecantos, who headed the PRC’s fact-finding committee on the alleged nursing leak, said that despite the recantation of Pamela Ortega, they felt that the findings of the committee would stand.