Two examinations

Published by the Visayan Daily Star Publications, Inc.

NINFA R. LEONARDIA Editor-in-Chief & President

CARLA P. GOMEZ Editor GUILLERMO TEJIDA III Desk Editor NANETTE L. GUADALQUIVER Busines Editor ERIC T. LORETIZO Sports Editor (On Leave) RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

Yesterday the Supreme Court released the names of the graduates from the various law schools in the country who had hurled the 2005 bar examinations. There were more than 5,000 students who had taken the tests, but only about 20 percent had been successful.

As in previous bar examination results, no controversy is expected to come up in this one, with those who had failed expected to accept their fate and, most likely, determine to make another try in the next one. Their schools, too, will do their best to help their unsuccessful examinees to get their bearings back and to prepare for the coming tests and try their best all over again.

This appears to be the case, even in the local schools offering the law course, because they had made sure that all rules had been followed and their graduates who took the examination had complied with all the requirements upon application and therefore could not question either the administration or the processing of their papers.

It seems a strange coincidence that the release of the bar examination results came close on the heels of the resolution of the controversy involving the results of another licensure examination, involving a local school, whose nursing course graduates had to go through several weeks of agony and suspense because the Board of Nursing had withheld the results of their tests due to some technicality, foremost of which, the BON claimed, was in the overloading of subjects allowed in violation of regulations.

Fortunately for the students, intervention by Congress who exerted pressure on the BON, enabled them to secure, not only the release of their grades, showing that they had passed the examination, but also allowing them to take their oaths as members of the profession.

The incident may be followed by some finger-pointing as to whom to blame for the fiasco in the case of the nursing graduates. Whatever comes out later, it is hoped that a more stringent adherence to regulations will henceforth be observed to spare not only the students, but also their parents, and the education officials concerned from the tension and the angst that all this had caused.*