Witness tags ‘brains’ of nursing leakage
Witness tags ‘brains’ of nursing leakage
A surprise witness told the Senate yesterday that a top official of the Philippine Nursing Association (PNA) who also owns a nursing school was the “brains” of controversial test leakage of the recent nursing board examination.
Appearing at the hearing of the Senate Committee on Civil Service and Government Reorganization, Dennis Alba Bautista, a Bachelor of Science Nursing graduate of the Philippine College of Health and Sciences, Inc. (PCHS) based in Recto, Manila, said it was George Cordero, PNA president and owner of PCHS who got the questionnaires for the nursing board exam in connivance with some unscrupulous officials of the Board of Nursing (BoN) and Professional Regulation Commission (PRC).
Bautista claimed that Cordero boasted to him that the reported leakage of the R.A. Gapuz center came from him, which was then subsequently leaked by another student.
Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) said the examiners’ manuscripts might have been the source of the leakage during the Board of Nursing examination on June 11 and 12, 2006.
This was bared yesterday by Regional Director (RD) lawyer Elfren Meneses, chief of NBI Anti-Fraud and Computer Crimes Division (AFCCD), saying initial investigation showed that the leakage most likely came from manuscripts of Test 3 and Test 5.
“It would seem that some manuscripts of the examiners could be the source of the reported leakage. How the manuscripts landed in the hands of other persons would be one of the concerns in the ongoing probe,” said Meneses.
Agents deployed in Baguio City found out that some nursing reviewee-examinees of the review centers there were flooded with review materials said to be photocopies of the examiners' manuscripts. “There was massive xerox copying of materials about 18 pages and some less than 18 pages which were the same with manuscripts,” said Meneses.
“We managed to trace these to manuscripts of Test 3 and 5 and we will invite the examiners to shed light on the matter. But as of now it is too premature to implicate anyone as we have to determine first how the examiners' manuscripts landed to reviewees,” he said, adding that one of the examiners bared that the original manuscript was missing.
Meneses did not name the examiner whose manuscript was missing. He added that the leakage could not possibly come from the PRC.
“This is the procedure, each of the examiners would prepare a manuscript containing 500 questions to be submitted to the PRC. Then the encoded test questions will be stored in a machine and the machine itself will choose 100 among the 500 questions. What was flooded among the reviewees were the 500 set of questionnaires and not the 100 set of questionnaire chosen by the PRC, meaning that the leakage could have come from manuscripts themselves,” he said. (Rolly T. Carandang & Jeamma E. Sabate)
FROM : http://www.tempo.com.ph/news.php?aid=26660
