Two Hundred Seven teachers from the Schools Division of Baguio City are attending the Professional Learning and Development Activities of Project SIRIB of DepEd-CAR through the National Educators Academy of the Philippines in the Region (NEAPR).
One of the aims of the project is to increase the number of qualified school leaders in the region by preparing them to take the National Qualifying Examination for School Heads (NQESH).
On the other hand, the basic requirement for a teacher to qualify to take the said examination must have at least one year as Head Teacher; or two years as Teacher In-Charge; or two years as Master Teacher; or five years as Teacher III or SPED Teacher; or five years as incumbent public school teacher who has five years managerial and supervisory experience in a DepEd recognized private institution or Commission on Higher Education (CHED) recognized higher education institution. All the teachers attending said professional development sessions complied with the aforesaid qualification.
In the 2013 examination, 17 out of the 86 applicants or 19.76% of the takers from the Schools Division of Baguio City made it to the 90 percentile rank from the 14, 567 nationwide. This was an extremely high percentage rate before and after the 2013 examinations. As I can recall, the passing rate for the last three years (2016 – 2018) ranges only from 6% to 8%. I do not know how many of the passers in the latest examination were able to make it on the first, second, third or even fourth take. It is the policy of the NEAP that those within the 10 percentile rank are considered passers. Since percentile rank is the basis, some of the passers are very proud to tell that they obtained 98.45,97.25 and the like. An examinee whose percentile rank is 89 interprets it as a matter of 1 point, he passes the examination. In some of the faculty meetings/gatherings, I had been explaining to some of my colleagues that percentile rank is different from percentage score. To illustrate how percentile rank is obtained, assuming there are 15,000 examinees, say, Rank 1, [(15,000-1)/15,000]x100=99.99. Suppose the examinee is rank 500th; [(15,000-500)/15,000]x100=96.67. Mathematically speaking, an examinee whose percentile rank of 89, is ranked 1,650 which is far from rank 1,500 with a person whose percentile rank of 90.00. This means that there are 150 examinees in between the 2 persons whose percentile ranks are 89 and 90. I hope that this illustration will clarify the misinterpretations between the percentile rank and percentage score, which sometimes result in misbelieving that it would be impossible for an examinee to obtain 99.99.
The cut-off score is set by NEAP at percentile 90 based on the total standard scores by the examinees in all performance domain covered by the examination. This implies that even if all examinees are intelligent, only 10% of them will be taken. I am optimistic that the SDO–Baguio City will set a record passing rate of more than 20% since the 207 teachers attending the Project SIRIB of DepEd-CAR through the NEAPR have sufficient time for their review since the examination has been reset to March 2022.
Moreover, this is the first time that the Regional Office will conduct a review for the teachers. I am expecting more examinees in March 2022 since the 2019 NQESH was not conducted due to the unexpected pandemic. Hence, the chance to be in the 90 percentile rank is greater if there will be more examinees.** By NIÑO M. TIBANGAY
