By Virgilio B. Lumicao
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| The exam venue |
A total of 435 Filipino workers in Hong Kong and Macau will
sit this Sunday, Sept 24, for this year’s Special Licensure Examination for
Teachers to be administered by the Professional Regulation Commission.
The examinees will troop before 6am to the test venue, the
Delia Memorial School–Hip Wo in Kwun Tong, Kowloon, for the various categories
of exams that will begin at 8am and finish at 6:30pm at the latest.
The PRC requires the takers to come before 6am and assemble
in their assigned room for general instructions and filling out of forms before
the actual test.
The final list of examinees announced by the PRC was 29
short of the 464 people who registered online for the exam in August. The
number of takers this year is also 34.5% fewer than the 664 who sat for the
test a year ago.
Nevertheless, what will count is the percentage of takers this
year who will hurdle the exam that will qualify them for a professional license
to teach.
Last year, the takers didn’t fare well in the exam with
barely 10% of them passing. That has prompted Labor Attaché Jalilo dela Torre
to challenge this year’s batch of examinees to do better.
“We just hope for the best results,” Gemma A. Lauraya,
president of the National Organization of Professional Teachers Hong Kong, told
The SUN.
Lauraya said the would-be teachers are expecting better
results this year than in previous editions of the exam.
“Teachers are open-minded, they take (Labatt Dela Torre’s
remark) as a challenge because it is their dream to become licensed
professional teachers,” Lauraya said.
The examinees are mostly excited while the others are
nervous even if they are repeaters because they do not know what the contents
of the test items will be, she added.
An examinee must obtain an average rating not lower than 75%
and must have no rating below 50% in any of the tests in order to pass the
exam, the PRC said.
Asked what could be the reason why 29 online applicants did
not make it to the final list, the NOPT leader said these registrants might not
have met the PRC’s standard requirements, as all of them have to be vetted by
the commission’s assessors.
She said others might have claimed to have questionable
units they had purportedly earned, especially if they were not education
graduates.
“So far, none of the NOPT applicants and reviewees had been
denied the exam,” Lauraya said.
The Philippine Overseas Labor Office in Hong Kong has
brought the annual exam to the SAR in cooperation with the PRC, in response to
the clamor of former teachers and education graduates who wish to teach when
they return home for good.
The complete lists of registered examinees for both the
elementary-level and secondary-level tests can be found here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1455550037895676.1073741843.806966486087371&type=3
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.1455552447895435.1073741844.806966486087371&type=3
