Thursday, October 12, 2006 Malig: Angeles U's open letter to President Arroyo By Jun A. Malig Cognition
THE Angeles University Foundation (AUF), probably Central Luzon 's premiere producer of quality nurses for domestic and international medical institutions, has urged Malacañang not to subject innocent nursing graduates to mandatory retake of the nursing test.
Below is AUF's open letter to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo:
"As an institution which had been operating its College of Nursing for more than 30 years and has produced thousands of registered nurses practicing here and abroad, we would like to express the position of the Angeles University Foundation and that of its nursing students who passed the June 2006 Nursing Licensure Examinations and have become unwilling victims in this present controversy plaguing the nursing profession.
"Firstly, we hereby declare that our nursing students are neither party to any fraud nor have they benefited from such. The review of our nursing board examinees is conducted within the premises of the university. While the university employs outside reviewers to supplement its review program, it does not include the INRESS Review Center, which is the alleged source of the nursing leak.
"Apparently, only a small minority of the 42,006 examinees who took the said examinations and the 17,821 who passed it, specifically those from Baguio and Manila, actually benefited from the said leakage. Similarly, we could confidently declare that none of the 408 AUF nursing students who took the examinations or the 306 who passed the same received any leak from anybody. In fact, the leak was allegedly disseminated on June 10, 2006 in Manila and Baguio, the day before the start of examinations, during which time the only activity of the AUF nursing examinees was to hear Holy Mass and to look at their respective examination sites.
"Moreover, in the last 30 years, the AUF College of Nursing has produced 2,826 nurses out of the 3,247 of its students who took the nursing licensure examinations, or an average of 87 percent. It ranked eighth in 1998 and sixth in 2003 among all nursing schools nationwide. At present, it is ranked ninth overall among 360 nursing schools. Yet, its passing rate is only 75 percent for the June 2006 Nursing Licensure Examinations, as released by the Professional Regulation Commission, much lower than its 30 year average. This only goes to show that the university's nursing examinees did not benefit at all from the leakage.
"Surely, the foregoing is similarly the experience of most established nursing schools whose passing rates have remained consistently high in the past due to their high academic standards. These established nursing schools, AUF included, comprise the silent majority of schools who do not have to resort to fraud and leakages to assure that their students pass in the licensure examinations and thus, would be greatly prejudiced by a retake of the nursing licensure examinations.
"Secondly, to delay the oath-taking of the successful examinees and even require a retake of the same, especially for causes not of their own making, would cause undue financial and emotional hardships and anxiety on the students and their loved ones who have made untold sacrifices just to pursue their dreams of becoming nurses. Nothing is said of the countless parents who have sold their possessions or borrowed from loan sharks just to make this dream a reality. We cannot also over-emphasize the trauma endured by the nursing examinees for the last four months brought about by the uncertainty this controversy has caused to their future. We cannot, therefore, just let their dreams be subverted by a few unscrupulous individuals."
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As a student of Political Science more than a decade ago at AUF, I usually admired my friends and acquaintances in the College of Nursing who seemed to have boundless energy to review their lessons. It was common at that time to see male and female students in all-white uniforms "talking" to themselves or repetitively reading a book or notebook, as if trying to memorize something.
Believe it or not, as part of the preparations for the board exam, the rooms and toilets in the houses of some of my friends were even filled with custom-made posters with review materials. "Para bago matulog o paggising sa umaga o habang nasa CR (comfort room) makakapag review pa rin ako," one of them reasoned.
If such was not dedication, I do not know what it was.
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