’07 nursing board results out in August

The results of the June 2007 nursing licensure examinations will be released in August, or a month later than the results of past tests have been, a member of the Board of Nursing (BoN) said.

“The release of the June 2007 nursing licensure examination results will be out by August 15 or 17 up to 31 at the Professional Regulation Commission office in Manila,” Marco Sto. Tomas of the BoN, which prepares and oversees the entire exam process, said.

He explained that the month’s delay is primarily due to the volume of examinees this year.

Some 78,000 nursing graduates took the June 10 and 11 exams, almost double the usual 40,000 examinees. Among them were some 13,000 passers of the June 2006 exam who retook tests 3 and 5 again on the recommendation of the United States Commission on Graduates of Foreign Nursing Schools (CGFNS).

The June 2006 nursing board exam was marred by the leak of test questions to some review centers. This controversy spurred congressional and criminal investigations, court cases, the replacement of the BoN members, and even a visit of CGFNS lawyers to observe this year’s board exam, as well as the preparations for it.

Sto. Tomas said the PRC's three optical machine readers, which can read and correct only 10,000 test papers a day, will take longer to come with the scores.

“We hope and pray that none will conk out [during the correction],” he said.

After the scores are known, the test papers will have to be matched to the examinees because “the test papers do not contain the names of the examinees, just their assigned numbers,” Sto. Tomas explained.

Then, the BoN will have to establish the mean passing score, which is computed from the highest and lowest scores.

Sto. Tomas said the BoN members will again go into isolation once the test papers are being corrected. At the moment, they are still preparing the answers.

He said this second period of isolation is to prevent the possibility of any of them being influenced to change the results of the exam in favor of selected examinees.

The BoN went incommunicado during the printing of the test questions, to dispel any suspicion they might leak out the test questions.

“Everything is being done to restore the integrity of the Philippine nursing licensure examinations. This exam is not the work of any one member of the board, but all of the board,” he said.