PRC: All systems go for nursing board exam on Dec. 2 to 3

While the controversy over the June licensure test for nursing has not yet been settled, the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) said yesterday that it’s all systems go for its second board examination this year on Dec. 2 and 3.

PRC chair Leonor Rosero said the commission would keep the five members of the Board of Nursing (BON) in "quarantine" starting Monday to ensure the secrecy of the test.

"They’ll be quarantined at the private printing press where the test questions will be printed through centralized printing. They can get out of the quarantine only on Dec. 3, one hour after the last examinee has completed the test," Rosero noted in an interview.

Close to 41,500 nursing graduates have registered to take the December test — almost the same number of examinees that took the leakage-tainted June exam. The five-test examination is composed of a total of 500 questions.

Rosero added that many of the 1,687 examinees from the June batch that were ordered by the Court of Appeals to repeat Tests 3 and 5 have applied to take the December test.

They will take Test 3 on Dec. 2 and Test 5 on Dec. 3, along with other examinees. They are the ones who initially failed the June exam, but passed after the PRC had recomputed the grades to cleanse the test of leakage.

The appellate court, however, nullified the re-computation and upheld the original grades.

According to Renato Aquino, president of the Alliance of New Nurses (ANN), some of the 1,687 examinees have opted to take their case to the CA. ANN is the coalition of June passers.

Rosero assured that safety nets have been put in place to prevent a repeat of the leakage.

"What happened in June was that the test questions that the (BON) examiners prepared were leaked out before they were stored in our data bank. For sure, the new Board is cautious that nobody will see their test questions," she said.

The PRC now intends to make sure that after the test questions have been encoded and before they are uploaded onto the data bank, the questions will be safeguarded.

Rosero added that each of the five examiners could encode their own test questions in the installation disk that will be protected by their own password, or they could tap the designated encoders of the commission.

After encoding, the examiners will make a template that computer programmers who install the test questions in the data bank will follow. These procedures will be done during the quarantine.

"On Nov. 30, we’ll start distributing the test questions. Which means that we have test booklet custodians who will leave on the night of Nov. 30 and they’ll go to areas that can be reached by land," she added.

For the regions reached by plane, the custodians will leave on Dec. 1.

Rosero maintained that in every region, the PRC has vaults where the test questions would be kept. — Sheila Crisostomo