Shame and scandal

By Jullie Y. Daza
Manila Bulletin

A TOTAL of 42,000 nursing students took the board exams in two days last June; 17,000 passed. The results were savagely marred by one student’s report of a leak — 110 questions out of 500 were conveyed in advance to an unknown number of candidates.

The leaks occurred in two of the five tests, test 3 (medical/surgical nursing) and test 5 (neuropsychiatric nursing) — 90 out of 100 questions in test 3, and 20 out of 100 questions in test 5.

In a frantic, desperate bid to plug the hole in the dam, the Professional Regulation Commission downgraded the passing score for test 3 from 60 points to 48 points, and "recomputed" the weight of test 5 from 20 percent to 2 percent. Afterwards, the PRC chairman applauded the clean-up by declaring to the task force probing the scandal that there was "no stigma!" anymore. (We should send PRC officials to Guimaras to clean up the oil spill there with their ingenious methods.)

Obviously, Malacañang has ignored the recommendations of the task force created by GMA to investigate the cheating. Obviously, and based on the statements coming from Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and Press Secretary Ignacio Bunye, the task force headed by Dante Ang is not supposed to punish the guilty, but only to spare the innocent.

PRC considers the problem "resolved" with the downgrading and recomputing and its position that there is no need for those who passed the exam to retake it. Ermita’s position is that only those who benefited from the leaks should take another test, and only in those "areas where the leakage would be proven to have taken place." In his own words, "We’ll leave to PRC the retake of the exam."

What a fine kettle of fish! The defendant is now the judge acquitting itself. And how, pray tell, does Mr. Ermita intend to find out who "benefited" from the leak and where?

We are piling one scandal on top of another and telling the world all is right, God is in His heaven and our paradise is trouble-free.