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Thursday, September 07, 2006
Education secretary finds low NAT scores embarrassing
By Linette C. Ramos
Sun.Star Staff Reporter
Education Secretary Jesli Lapus found embarrassing the low scores in the last National Achievement Test (NAT) but downplayed suspicions there was cheating during the exams last March.
Speaking at the 2nd National ICTs in Basic Education Congress yesterday, Lapus said majority of the grade six, first and fourth year high school students who took the NAT did not get at least the 75 percent mark in all the subjects.
“This means that most of them do not have the required competencies in English, math, science, social studies and Filipino.
I feel embarrassed reading this because we have delegates from foreign countries, but we cannot talk of a master plan without a reality check,” he told over 1,000 educators who attended the event.
Lapus discussed the Philippine Master Plan for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Basic Education, which he said will help make Filipino students productive and globally competitive.
In an interview before the congress, the secretary told reporters that the possibility of cheating in the NAT is very remote, considering that teachers do not get to watch over their own students during the exam.
“Cheating is remote because the scores are not high. We are concerned about improving the quality of education because the NAT shows the defects,” Lapus said.
“In this region, there is talk that everyone is trying to outdo each other. There is a competition on the test results but the grades are also low,” he lamented.
Last month, Cebu City Government officials doubted the NAT results, saying these were not credible since mountain barangay schools fared better than the schools in the lowlands.
They also said the results were such because of massive cheating in the exams.
Partial results of the NAT for Central Visayas showed that the Cebu City Schools Division ranked only 11th in the test given to first year high school students, out of the 15 schools division in the region.
Cebu City ranked fourth in the test given to grade six students.
The Department of Education (DepEd) is still analyzing the test results but initially, Lapus said they already noted a nationwide trend that schools in the countryside fared better than the schools in urban areas.
The department also observed that schools in depressed areas in Southern Leyte, Eastern Samar and the Caraga region got higher scores than the schools in urban areas across the country.
“We made sure the proctors are coming from different areas so there is no incentive, if at all, there was cheating like what others suggested. Objective yung mga nagbantay, hindi concerned na magpataas kasi hindi naman nila skwelahan yon,” Lapus added.
Central Visayas ranked third among all regions in the country in the NAT for high school, but got a lower ranking in the exams for grade six.
DepEd 7 Director Carolino Mordeno agreed with Lapus, saying teachers will not tolerate cheating during the exams since it is not their students who will benefit from it.
In the region, teachers from a certain school were assigned as proctors for students from a different school, Mordeno explained.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (September 7, 2006 issue)
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