CA asked to reconsider nursing board ruling
By Tetch Torres
INQ7.net
Last updated 07:11pm (Mla time) 10/16/2006
GROUPS advocating a total retake of the June nursing licensure examinations last June asked the Court of Appeals (CA) on Monday to reconsider its ruling for 1,697 nursing graduates to undergo a partial retake of the leak-tainted board exam.
The 15-page motion for reconsideration filed by Rene Luis Tadle, president of the University of Sto. Tomas Faculty of Nursing, the League of Concerned Nursing and the Binuklod na Samahan ng mga Student Nurses called the appellate court’s decision “partly unacceptable” because it supposedly does not directly address the issue of the leakage of test questions.
Lawyer Pia Bersamin said her clients are happy the CA nullified Resolution 31 of the Professional Regulation Commission, which invalidated 20 of the 100 questions of Test 3 and ordered a recomputation of Test 5, the portions of the nursing board exam the questions to which were leaked.
"By removing the effect of the now annulled Resolution 31, the 'unaltered' result (of the exam) was reinstated, along with the leaked questions,” the motion said.
But, it added, “the leakage problem was not solved. If the effect of the leakage remained in the Nursing Licensure Examination, the integrity of the examination remains in question."
It added that limiting the partial retake to only 1,687 examinees “defeats the right to equal protection of laws of the other examinees in the same situation."
Bersamin said they were standing by their position that there should be a nationwide retake of the June board exam.
A nursing graduate, Dennis Bautista, also went to the CA to protest its ruling, saying it erred in ordering the partial retake for only 1,687 examinees.
Bautista contended there should be more since more than 2,000 nursing graduates attended the coaching session of the R. Gapuz Review Center, more than 1,000 attended that of the Inress Review Center, and the coaching sessions of Pentagon were held twice at the Aliw theatre.
It was during these sessions that the test questions were allegedly leaked.
