By Danilo P. Padua, PhD

The agriculturist board examination is fairly new. It is otherwise known as Agriculture Licensure Examination (ALE). It is a babe, so to speak, compared to many local board examinations. It is an offshoot of R.A. 8435 or the Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act of 1997.
Before the first agriculture board exam was administered, several consultations were held. In one of such consultations, I actually questioned why we need to have such a board exam, reasoning that what we need is just better technology to improve our agricultural productivity. “We don’t need a license to make the soil more productive in order to feed our burgeoning population”, I muttered! The well-known personalities in the newly-formed Board of Agriculture just brushed me off with their booming voices. Maybe it was a case of a calf, locking horns with grizzled, tested machos.
The first ALE was conducted in 2002, so it is barely 15 years old. Many might be surprised that there are at least 223 universities and colleges nationwide, public and private, that are sources of examinees. The result of the first exam was one of the bases in determining the first 6 centers of excellence(COE) in agriculture education. The COE and center of development (COD) award were conceptualized by the Commission on Higher Education to provide impetus and spur educational improvement in various higher education institutions.
The initial COEs in agriculture education were U.P. at Los Banos, Central Mindanao University, Visayas State University, University of Southern Mindanao, Central Luzon State University and Benguet State University.
For the last four years (2014-2017), the passing rate of BSU agriculture board takers exceeded the national passing rate. That could be considered an “excellent” performance since they garnered an average higher than the national average passing rate for each of the year involved.
For 2015, one of the BSU examinees, Ms Dominga Magnanang, placed 10th out of 1,888 takers while in the April, 2017 examination, another BSU examinee, Ms Nora Hill Evasco, garnered 5th place out of 927 examinees. By any yardstick, this is an indication of very good performance for a board exam.
There were some years though when BSU’s passing rate dived a shade below the national passing rate. And there’s the rub. The university is currently in the process of having its Bachelor of Science in Agriculture degree be fully accredited to Level 4 under the national accrediting agency called Accrediting Agency of Chartered Colleges and Universities in the Philippines. Full Level 4 accreditation means a school is at par with internationally-recognized foreign schools.
A passing rate that is consistently higher than the national average is also a must to sustain a COE award.
The top performing schools in terms of total passers for the last 6 years in the ALE indicate that there are only 8 SUCs that produced at least an average of 50 passers every year. These are CMU, MSU, USM, UPLB, BSU, VSU, CLSU and USEP.
The Benguet State University has the 5th largest number of passers, after CMU, MSU, USM, and UPLB.
As to the total number of examinees, there were only 15 schools with an average of 50 or more examinees for the last 5 years. Only 5 however had an average of at least 200 examinees per year or a total of 1,000 or more. BSU had the 4th largest number of examinees, exceeded only by CMU, USM, and MSU. The number of examinees should be an indication of how a program is running. It should certainly be part of an equation on how or why a school is to be supported.
Only four (UPLB, CMU, MSU and USM) had at least an average of 50 examinees with at least 50% passing rate, and only one school (UPLB) had at least an average of 50 examinees and more than 60% passing rate every year.
When a school sends a much greater number of examinees on a consistent basis, it is a sure sign that its agriculture program is being greatly considered by students and parents alike. Setting the bar so high at the moment then would mean that even old and known schools such as CLSU and BSU would not pass the standard.
There are some compelling reasons why schools like BSU could hardly breach the 50% passing mark. One, that the school does set any lofty standard of secondary grade requirements unlike schools like UPLB whose students are culled from the highest 10 percentile of graduating high school students. That means greater extra effort to be exerted to train students to perform better. Two, that while BSU attracts students from various parts of the country, and even outside the Philippines, most of its students come from CAR especially Benguet and Mtn. Province, where high schools are not as well supported as in the lowlands. Again, this puts a strain on the teaching-learning processes and therefore necessitating extra effort from the faculty and the administration along this line.
Third, that with the establishment of the 4Ps program, BSU is forced to accept enrollees even if students are not really well prepared to undertake the rigorous tertiary education program. Fourth, that it can not impose strict (in relation to academic credentials) enrollment requirements since the community itself and even the local politicians will raise a howl of protest on why some students are “discriminated” against. The school. they say, is a government school, so students from all walks of life should have access to it.
Despite the above situation, BSU was able to somehow make some headway on the performance of its graduates in the ALE. Maybe this could be attributed in a major way, to the agriculture program itself of the university, the dedication of its faculty members and the support of the administration.
Many of the factors such as high school scholastic preparations, that have bearing on results of examination, is beyond the control of the university. That’s why the percentage passing rate should be balanced by the number of board passers as bases of evaluation of a school’s performance.
As far as the number of passers and number of total examinees are concerned, BSU is the top agricultural school in the entire Central-Northern Luzon. While percentage passing is a very important gauge on how a school is performing, it should not be the main measurement for awarding a COE or a Level 4 accreditation. After all, what the agriculture profession and industry needs is the number of licensed agriculturists. A school may have 50-100% passing rate but if it has only twenty or less examinees, its contribution to the pool of licensed experts will not be that substantial. **