CHED SHOULD SUPERVISE REVIEW CENTERSANGARA

Senator Edgardo J. Angara today expressed his support for the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) to regulate the establishment and operation of review centers to protect all licensure examinees from unethical practices committed by review centers.

CHED was directed to regulate the review centers through E.O. 566 which was signed on September 16 in the wake of the recent nursing board examination cheating scandal.

"I really think that CHED should act as the primary supervisor and must be accountable for regulating review centers, not the Office of the President. For one, Malacanang accommodates numerous reports coming from various government agencies and institutions everyday," Angara pointed out.

On a day to day basis, Malacanang's hands are already full with all its paperwork. We might as well put the regulation of review centers into CHED's hands now that we cannot afford to compromise the well-deserved good reputation of Filipino nurses here and abroad, he continued.

Angara earlier pointed out that under the nursing law, the chairman and members of the board of examiners are nominated solely by the Philippine Nurses Association, a regulatory devise intended to be a self-policing, peer-regulating mechanism which has gone askew.

The root cause of the scandal engulfing the recent nursing licensure examinations lies in the fact that the members of the current exam board for nurses were handpicked by the president of the Philippine Nurses Association., who happens to be the owner of both a nursing school and a review center from where the leak allegedly came, Angara said.

Angara authored the law which created CHED in May 1994. CHED was created to be independent and separate from the Department of Education.