PRC urged to reveal questionnaires in teachers board exams for scrutiny

                       With the continued decline in performance of teachers in the board exams, the Professional Regulation Commission (PRC) is being urged to reveal the questionnaires used for the test so they can be “scrutinized.”

                     The Philippine for Business Education (PBEd), a nonprofit, nonstock organization that aims to be the business community’s response to the need for consensus and sustained advocacy in education reform, believes that the questions in the Board Licensure Examination for Professional Teachers (BLEPT) might be among reasons why teachers who take the exam during the past nine years continue to perform so poorly.

                    PBEd executive director Love Basillote lamented that the PRC continues to reject disclosing previous BLEPT test questions citing “leakage and security concerns.” She noted that there have been questions about the quality of the test among stakeholders. “Whenever we have a discussion forum, educators always ask if the test itself is of high quality because in many countries, they certify teachers differently…it’s not just purely on one standardized exam,” she said.

                  Basillote said the PRC should be open to releasing the exam questions after each test instance “so that it can be scrutinized by experts as to whether it’s really a good screening mechanism or not.”

                  For PBEd research director Dylan Dellosa, the BLEPT test “needs to be tested.” Among the benefits of having the test questions released, he said, is that “it compels the board to keep the test bank fresh, meaning quality, no recycling, but most importantly, relevant to what the current needs are, what the current standards are.”

                  Dellosa suspects that there is a “disconnect between the exam and what is being taught” in Teacher Education Institutions (TEIs). Since the exam is “cloaked in mystery,” the stakeholders and the public have no way of knowing if the questions being asked are still relevant to what teachers have learned. “We want to be able to test the test because nobody really knows what happens in test development,” he added.

                   Earlier, PBEd has released a study on the teachers’ board exams performance of all the TEIs in the country from October 2009 to March 2017. It is revealed that around half of the TEIs – or schools which offer education programs – continue to “perform poorly.”
After analyzing data from the PRC, PBEd said that in the past 9 years, the BLEPT takers registered only a “dismal 31-percent passing rate.” It was revealed that 497 out of 1,024 TEIs – who had their graduates take the board exams for elementary – are below the national passing rate. Likewise, 637 out of 1,258 TEIs for the secondary examination are also performing below average.

                   With the continued refusal of the PRC to release the questionnaires for every teachers’ board exam, PBEd said it might use the government’s Freedom of Information (FOI) website to obtain them.