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OMBUDSMAN Merceditas Gutierrez approved on Wednesday the
filing of criminal charges against two members of the
Board of Nursing for the June 2006 nursing examinations
leakage.
In a
25-page resolution, the Ombudsman’s panel that
investigated the incident recommended the filing of
graft charges and for violation of Section 15 (a) of
Republic Act 8981 (An Act Modernizing the Professional
Regulation Commission) against Anesia Buenafe-Dionisio
and Virginia Diolola-Madeja before the Sandiganbayan.
Madeja
was the examiner in medical surgery nursing while
Dionisio was the examiner in psychiatric nursing.
The case
stemmed from a complaint filed before the National
Bureau of Investigation (NBI) by the Professional
Regulation Commission (PRC) in connection with the
alleged leakage of the test questions in some subjects
in the Nurses Licensure Examination (NLE) given on June
11 and 12 last year.
Records
of the case show that a few days after the examinations,
complaints about an alleged leakage incident in Baguio
City after “students-reviewees, identified through their
jackets as from the RA Gapuz Review Center, finished the
examination faster than the other examinees.” This
resulted in the filing of a complaint before the PRC
main office in Manila.
The
investigation conducted by the PRC investigating
committee showed that “a total of 56 situations
contained in respondent Madeja’s manuscript, identified
as keywords, appeared in the handwritten “reviewer”
distributed to the reviewees of RA Gapuz Review Center
in Baguio City and other parts of the country and five
situations there … with a total of 25 questions actually
came out in the NLE in the subject Medical Surgery
Nursing Test.”
It also
said “majority of respondent Dionisio’s test questions
both handwritten and in computer printed notes were
shown to have reached the reviewees of RA Gapuz Review
Center and Institute for Review and Special Studies (Inress),
Manila, and in other parts of the country.”
The PRC
report also said a total of 90 questions from Dionisio’s
test were among the 100 examination questions asked in
the NLE in psychiatric nursing.
In the
report submitted by the NBI, it identified the alleged
perpetrators of the act complained of as Dionisio and
Madeja.
It
dismissed Dionisio’s defense of alleged loss of her
manuscript for lack of supporting proof.
The NBI
also did not give merit to Madeja’s defense of the
possibility that the leakage in the NLE Test III,
involving her prepared questions, was “maliciously
reproduced when she went to a computer shop.”
In its
resolution, the panel said the respondents’ defenses
“fail miserably to controvert the glaring fact that the
only possible sources of the so-called ‘leakage’ in the
2006 Nursing Licensure Examinations could have only been
the very persons who prepared and submitted the
examination questions which have been maliciously
disclosed, that is, respondents Anesia Dionisio and
Virginia Madeja.”
The
panel, however, still has to conduct a fact-finding
investigation to determine the possible involvement of
other individuals involved in the leakage. |
