A signal to graduating students

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 CEDELF P. TUPAS Sports Editor RENE GENOVE Bureau Chief, Dumaguete MAJA P. DELY Advertising Coordinator

CARLOS ANTONIO L. LEONARDIA Administrative Officer

The results of the latest National Career Assessment Examination administered by the Department of Education to the graduating high school students of the country have shown disheartening conclusions about their capacity to enter and qualify in college.

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus has also noted that the tests had confirmed what they had also found out after giving the fourth year high school students the annual achievement tests. This was the determination that, out of some 1.3 million graduating students, more than half, or about 700,000 are not fit to go to college.

This should send a strong signal, not only to the students themselves, but especially to their parents and teachers, that it may be just an exercise in futility to insist on enrolling in college courses that may be beyond their capacity to complete, or even learn from.

A conclusion made from the NCAE result was that such students should not be encouraged to go into courses that they are incapable of coping with, or, even if, by some stroke of luck, they manage to graduate from, would not be able to pass the professional examinations required afterwards.

The study implies that these students would be finding themselves more if they were to go into vocational or technical courses which are usually completed in shorter times, than in the more demanding "heavies" like, say, medicine, law, engineering, or teaching. And yet, it would be interesting to monitor the courses that many of these kind of students will prefer to take up, or to which their parents will direct them. If this happens, then the chances are great that we will have so many non-passers of professional examinations, or mediocre practitioners of professions they are not meant for.

With these findings, the DepEd should institute measures like counseling for graduating students, with the purpose of making them see the dignity of technical and vocational work, other than those imbued with the prestige and glamour of elitist professions which they are not equipped to attain.*