July 2011 Nurse Licensure Examination Result - July 2011 Nurse Board Exam Result

The PRC manipulated grades creating a situation where

Passers become flunkers,
flunkers become passers

Thousands of June 2006 Nursing Licensure Examination passers have happily taken their oaths as professionals following a Court of Appeals decision junking petitions for the leakage-tainted NLE to be voided and for a new exam to be given. Not many know, however, that:

• The licenses of those who are eventually found by ongoing investigations to have benefited from or got involved in the leakage will be revoked.

• Making flunkers out of passers and passers out of flunkers—the Court of Appeals had ruled that the 1,687 passing examinees had wrongly benefited from the PRC’s recomputation of test grades and should be made to retake the NLE while 1,186 examinees whom the PRC had originally passed were removed from the list of board passers after the October 13 recomputation of test grades.

• The United States’ National Council of State Boards of Nursing, while officially not making public comments about the PRC and June NLE mess, have told President Arroyo and NCLEX Task Force head and Commission on Filipinos Overseas, among other officials, that 16 US states are eyeing the June 2006 batch of Filipino nurses with suspicion.

• That the NCSBN officials, led by its president, Ms. Faith Fields, have told Philippine officials clearly—and the Philippine Nurses’ Association obliquely in Ms. Fields’ keynote speech to them at the PNA assembly—that the granting of the Philippine request that NCLEX tests be held in the Philippines will happen “in due time” depending on how satisfactorily the current NLE leakage scandal is settled.

• The pro-retake petitioners defeated at the Court of Appeals are taking the case to the Supreme Court.

• The Philippine Nurses Association in the United Kingdom is upset and anxious about the way the NLE leakage scandal has been handled by the PRC and warn that the prestige of Filipino nurses in general “and the integrity and credibility of the [Philippine] licensure examination,” has suffered.

The NLE-leakage scandal has made observers recall that the PRC had also botched up the recent board exams for sanitary engineers.

“It was an honest mistake. It was never intentional,” the PRC explained that fiasco. The PRC, on September 25, 2006, or one day after the sanitary licensure examination, issued the list of top 10 passers. After a few days, several examinees complained that their scores were even higher than some of those listed as topnotchers.

The PRC then claimed that this snafu was an isolated case.

Isolated case?
Isolated or not, what is clear is that the PRC is not permitted to commit mistakes, honest or dishonest, in dealing with the grades of examinees in professional licensure examinations.

Under the PRC Modernization Law, the commission has a mandate to establish and maintain a high standard of admission to the practice of all professions and to at all times ensure and safeguard the integrity of all licensure examinations.

The PRC is left no room for maneuver. It has no discretion to compromise standards. It has no discretion to manipulate scores. It has no discretion to pass those who deserve to fail and fail those who deserve to pass.

Observers now wonder how that mistake could have been committed—unless there was an effort to manipulate the results.

Manipulation of results
The PRC, by its executives’ own admission, did rule and take steps to manipulate results in the June 2006 NLE through their recomputations and reassignment of percentages for Tests 3 and 5. (See Sunday Times special report of September 24 for a comprehensive analysis of the recomputations.)

As a result, some examinees in the fraud-marred nursing examination garnered averages of 71.2 percent and 72.3 percent. The PRC, however, still included their names on the “passed” list. The PRC then clearly manipulated these scores because the passing grade is 75 percent.

But those who have passed and taken their oath could still be stripped of their professional status as nurses. An NBI investigation is still going on and those who were originally judged by the PRC itself to have benefited from the leakage could go back to their “fail status.”

The Times saw a group of 30 examinees who were passers in the early result but are now being asked to retake. They were originally on the no-retake side but have now switched to the re-take faction.

A mother’s lament
The mother of one of these former passers told The Times, “”Sana, noong una pa, ibinagsak na nila ang anak ko kasi bagsak naman talaga. Mas katanggap-tanggap pa iyon. Bakit pa nila pinalitan ang grado niya? Paano na ngayon? Mababawi na ang lisensiya niya. Nakakahiya. [They should have flunked my daughter outright. After all, she really failed. That would have been more acceptable. Why did they have to change her grade? How is that now? They will revoke her license. How shameful this is.] “

In the CA hearing, PRC officials said that some examinees garnered averages of 73 percent to 74.9 percent. Exercising their discretion, they adjusted the grades to 75 percent. They told the same thing in the Senate. They told the same thing in the House of Representatives. At first, they said only 499 were beneficiaries of their manipulation. Now, it is coming out that the number is much bigger—1,687. This is thrice as much as the original figure they acknowledged earlier. The changing figures raise doubts about these executives’ “honest mistakes.”

Those who have looked into the matter in depth find that some 1,186 examinees who passed have been made to fail.

These examinees are reportedly getting ready to file lawsuits against the PRC. It could have avoided all these troubles if it had just decided to order a re-take as regulatory bodies do in the United States when there is a scandal.

Fight is not over
For nursing Prof. Rene Tadle of the University of Santo Tomas (UST), a staunch general retake advocate and one of the pro-take petitioners, the no-re-take victory is half-baked.

“The fight is not yet over,” Tadle said, adding that he and the other petitioners “would die fighting for the cause of upholding the integrity of the nursing profession by doing what is morally called for.”

Tadle, who is the president of the UST nursing faculty, disclosed that he had already received death threats through letters and e-mails and threatened with harm.

“If that is the consequence of fighting for what is right, then so be it,” he said.

The UST nursing faculty, along with nurses from the University of the Philippines (UP), University of the East (UE) and Far Eastern University (FEU), all leading nursing schools, filed a motion for reconsideration on the CA’s decision for a partial retake.

Tadle maintained that the oath-taking should have been deferred even if there was no legal impediment in doing so because it did not in any way solve the crux of the problem.

“On the contrary,” Tadle pointed out, “it would only create complications later on if it is proven that the board passer benefited from the leakage.”

“The system has been tainted,” Tadle said. “What should be done is to cleanse the system and the only way to do it is retake.”

According to Tadle, test-leakage is not only confined in the Philippines but happens as well in other countries, including the United States.

What is important, he said, is what course of action to take. “In the US they immediately order a retake of the entire examination while we only wanted a retake on Tests 3 and 5,” Tadle pointed out.