MANILA, Philippines – The Professional Regulation Commission insisted on Friday that the licensure examination for civil engineers that was administered in the Middle East last December in which only one of the 151 takers passed was fair and responsive to current trends.
The PRC was responding to a complaint Qatar chapter of the Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers (PICE), which charged that the number of questions in the examinations given Dec. 9-11, 2011 in different places in the Middle East had been unreasonably and unfairly increased from the standard 30 to 100.
The group questioned why the PRC gave last November a 30-item test per subject to takers in the Philippines while making unannounced adjustments on the Special Professional Licensure Board Examinations to overseas Filipino workers.
“Technically, it is not completely correct to say there was an increase [in questions],” PRC spokesman Louis Valera told the Philippine Daily Inquirer. “It is within the discretion of the PRC board to give 100-item questionnaires because it is in the table of specifications.”
He cited a provision in the commission’s Resolution 2 Series of 1995, which pertains to the promulgation of the syllabi for the subjects in the Civil Engineering Licensure Examinations that states: “The board shall provide a minimum of 500 questions for each subject from which the computer of the commission will select at random on the day or a few days prior to the examinations the questions to be given. The number of questions for each subject shall not be less than 20 at 4 points each. The maximum number of questions shall not be more than 100 at 1 point each.”
The subjects in the PRC-administered examinations for civil engineers are Mathematics and Surveying; Hydraulics and Geology; and Structural Design.
The board’s discretion, Valera said, was based on the responsiveness of the examinations to current trends to ensure the competitiveness of takers in their respective fields.
“The PRC does not need to advise them [licensure examination takers] because they are supposed to be well aware of this,” he said, adding that the board has the option to change the manner of the examinations if needed “as long as they play within the range” of allowable number of questions per subject.
The PRC spokesperson told the Inquirer that it would have been unfair if the board gave exactly the same test as the exams given in the Philippines and those given outside the country were conducted on different dates.
He said that citing the passing rates in previous examinations was not the right measure to determine if the last exams were fair or not.
“The examination would have been questionable if nobody passed. But someone passed, so there is nothing wrong with the test. They just got used to the 30-item exams.”
The PICE-Qatar Chapter, led by its president Delfino De Leon, had complained to several government agencies over the examinations saying, “We were surprised and very disappointed that the regulatory board of Civil Engineering/PRC had radically adjusted the number of questions for each subject from 30 to 36 items to 100 items and allotted the same answer period of four to five hours.”
“Calculating from these, an examinee has a maximum of three minutes to read, understand, analyze and compute and finally shade the answer to each item in the questionnaire. Considering this time limit and the stressful conditions in a testing center, we can say that passing this type of board examinations is almost impossible,” it said, adding adding that there was no advisory from the PRC about the increase in the number of questions.
“We consider this so-called adjustment, unreasonable and unfair to the examinees here in the Middle East,” the complaint said.