Advocates for nursing exam retake seek SC intervention

First posted 11:57am (Mla time) Nov 03, 2006
INQ7.net

(2ND UPDATE) THE SUPREME Court has been asked to intervene in the nursing controversy by groups pushing for a complete retake of the June licensure exams.
In their 39-page joint petition, the College of Nursing Faculty Association of the University of Sto. Tomas (UST), League of Concerned Nurses, and the Binuklod na Samahan ng Mga Student Nurses (Alliance of Student Nurses’ Organizations) urged the high court to order the government to hold a repeat of the exams and to nullify the oaths and licenses that had been taken by some of the examinees.

They also said that the Court of Appeals had abused its discretion when it allowed a partial retake by 1,687 nursing graduates whose names were added to the list of board passers after the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) had recomputed the test scores amid a leakage in some portions of the exam.

The Supreme Court should “erase the stigma that casts doubt on the competence of the nursing examinees and the integrity of licensure examination in the country,” the groups said.

They also said that the appeals court ruling has “set a frightening precedent for all PRC board examinations where examinees can become doctors, nurses, engineers or teachers by cheating so long as such cheating is not widespread and so long as the cheaters cannot be identified.”

Among other things, the groups said “letting the high scores in some subjects pull up poor scores in other subjects also violates the specific subject competency rule,” pointing out that the “essence of the rule is that every examinee should earn a grade of at least 60% in each subject.”

“The BoN [Board of Nursing] cannot use the high scores they [examinees] earned in some subjects to pull up a failing score in one subject. But the formula adopted by the BoN with the Professional Regulation Commission [PRC] approval ignored this rule,” the groups said.

They added that the nursing licensure tests could not be compared with the Bar exams and that the PRC and BoN improperly invoked the remedy used by the Supreme Court when it found a leakage in the test for mercantile law two years ago, prompting the high tribunal to annul the test in that subject and distribute its 15% weight proportionately among the other subjects.

“The SC has been empowered by the Constitution to enact rules that will govern admission to the bar. For this reason, it could amend its rules as it wishes, even as to exclude a particular subject from the bar examinations. Here [nursing exam], however, it is legislature that established the standard for admission to the nursing profession. Neither the PRC nor the Board of Nursing has the authority to amend these rules,” said the groups through their lawyer Roberto Abad.

They also said that about 3,700 or one-fifth of the successful examinees were believed to have benefited from the leak when they attended the "final coaching" sessions at the R.A. Gapuz Review Center, and the Inress Review Center branches in Manila and Baguio City, where the leakage allegedly took place.

The petition before the high court followed conciliation and mediation talks presided by the appellate court among the concerned parties, which included the petitioners, the PRC, and some examinees who had passed the board after the PRC recomputation.

Following the meeting, the appeals court had ordered more than 15,000 examinees that had passed before a PRC recomputation to take their oaths and another 1,000 to retake parts of the board exam that had been leaked, prompting the UST-led alliance to file a motion for reconsideration before the high court.

But Pia Bersamin, counsel for the UST organization, said they doubted whether their motion would be resolved “in our favor.”

Earlier on Friday, Rene M. Tadle, president of the UST College of Nursing Faculty Association, said their decision to file the petition was made with “a heavy heart,” but that the controversy “was far from over.”

He cited the announcement of Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS) deferring the visa screening application of the successful examinees from batch 2006 and Labor Secretary Arturo Brion's pronouncement that there were "a lot of aberrations in the computation of grades of the examinees."

Tetch Torres, Veronica Uy