An official of the Philippine Nurses' Association (PNA) allegedly paid P7 million to obtain test leakages for the June 2006 Nursing Board Examination, ABS-CBN's Bandila reported Monday.
The report quoted information from the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC), which conducted a fact-finding probe on the alleged leakage.
Jorge Cordero, PNA president and the official alluded to in the PRC report, dismissed the accusation. "Kung totoong nagbayad kami di sana number one ang anak ko. Bakit bagsak ang anak ko? (If it is true we paid for the leakage, why is it that my child failed the exam?)"
He threatened to file libel charges against those accusing him of initiating the test leakage.
The agency report said Cordero paid P7 million to the Bureau of Nursing examiners, the group that formulates questions for the board examination.
After obtaining the leakage, Cordero allegdly sold the test questions to students.
A nursing student who took the exam, however, told a Bandila interview that he got hold of a copy of the test leakage from a friend.
Wesley Pristin said one of his friends, whom he declined to named, benefited from the leakage and would testify on the circumstances regarding the leakage.
"They were writing it down," Pristin said, adding that the leakage was presented during a review class. His friend described the pacing of the prsentation as "too fast" because other reviewees failed to catch up and take notes, Pristin said.
He, however, could not tell whether the leakage came from professors or the reviewers.
"I’m not so sure if it was from the Gapuz Review Center," he said.
The review center denied that the leak came from them.
"Pagpasok pa lang ng mga estudyante hawak na nila yung mga manuscripts na iyon. Mukhang kalat na sa mga estudyante yan. (The students already had the manuscripts. It looks like the leakage was already circulating among the students)," said Ray Gapuz.
PRC is set to decide Tuesday on whether to validate the whole board examination or render it invalid.
Other options being studied include the retaking of the whole examination without payment for the examinees; a retake of sections 3 and 5, which were the subject of the alleged leakage; or disregard the sections mentioned in computing the grades already made by PRC
FROM: abs-cbn news
http://http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=47395
