Board takers from UP air gripes over eng’g exam

A GROUP of mechanical engineering board exam takers from the University of the Philippines has written the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) to criticize the way the last test was conducted.

Their complaints ranged from the delayed distribution of exam materials, incoherently phrased questions, to the questionable behavior of certain proctors.

They called on the PRC to make “a corrective action” and “fix and settle this issue today in order to avoid the same issues in the future and provide the country with the best and deserving engineers of tomorrow.”

The letter was signed by 52 UP graduates who took the board exam on Sept. 29 and 30. On Oct. 9, or a week after it received the letter, the PRC announced that 2,136 of the 3,866 takers passed the test.

“Honor and excellence are the two core values that our university has instilled in us. Thus, we are not turning a blind eye to what we have witnessed,” they said.

In an interview on Sunday, two of the signatories—mechanical engineering graduates Job Immanuel Encarnacion and Roderaid Ibañez—said that although they were among those who passed, they were not happy about the way they obtained their licenses.

“The exam may not be an ultimate measure of ability, but apparently, what happened was that it didn’t measure anything at all,” said Encarnacion, who is now working on his master’s degree also at UP.

He and Ibañez recalled, for example, that the thermodynamic and steam tables necessary to arrive at the answers were not immediately provided by the proctors. Some of the questions in the test were repeated, badly phrased or impossible to answer “using the right solutions.”

Ibañez also noted many grammatical and typographical errors, as well as mismatched questions and diagrams.

On Day One of the exams, a proctor told the test takers to skip some questions while waiting for the thermodynamic and steam tables, Encarnacion said. But the tables were not provided to them and Encarnacion was able to answer only 17 of the 50 questions.

When the tables finally arrived on the second day, Encarnacion said he “wanted to tear my paper up out of frustration.”

“The exam does not justify what I learned in school. I can’t accept that I was able to get a license by making guesses,” Ibañez added.

A social media post after the exams also raised allegations of cheating although Ibañez stressed that “cheating [was] not the issue.” “It’s the system, the quality and conduct of the board exams which seem to have been the norm ever since,” he said.

Reached for comment on Monday, PRC Commissioner and Acting Chair Angeline Chua Chiaco said the matter had already been resolved. The incoherent, “senseless” or invalid questions in the exam were already disregarded in the computation of the scores, she told the Inquirer in an e-mail.

“Upon the recommendation of PRC’s test consultants, those questions were disregarded and only valid questions were considered,” she said.

“As to the content and quality of the questions given, the PRC concluded that everything is in order after considering and addressing all issues raised by the complaining examinees. As to the conduct of the (exams), we will determine the veracity of the allegations against the proctors after the scheduled conference,” Chiaco added.

She advised examinees who witnessed incidents of cheating to file formal complaints in the PRC.

Encarnacion, meanwhile, recalled how a proctor casually told him about previous instances in which other proctors chose to just ignore cheaters. In his case, some of his co-examinees were repeatedly caught talking to each other in the middle of the test but the proctors simply moved them to other seats, he added.

Another UP examinee, Michael Vizconde, also aired his dismay on Facebook. Vizconde said he wanted to walk out in the middle of the test for not having the materials needed to answer the questions. However, a proctor tried to talk him out of it, suggesting he should just guess the answers.