More than 1 million 4th-yr students take the NCAE

MANILA, Philippines - More than one million high school students all over the country on Wednesday took the examination meant to determine which career paths they should take in the future. GMA’s Flash Report quoted the Department of Education as saying that the National Career Assessment Examination (NCAE), which is being conducted both in private and public schools, started at 7 a.m. and is expected to end by noon. The DepEd said the five-hour examination was devised to gauge the skills and scholastic abilities of graduating high school students. After assessing the examinees’ aptitudes, the DepEd would then recommend to the students which college courses would best suit them. The DepEd said the NCAE was created in response to the growing job mismatch in the Philippines. The DepEd has already set up an Action Center at its Central Office in Pasig City to provide information regarding the NCAE, and handle queries and complaints. Only in its second year, the NCAE was launched to replace the traditional National College Entrance Examination. Unlike its predecessor, the NCAE does not only evaluate students’ general scholastic skills but also their abilities in three additional domains, namely technical-vocational aptitude, entrepreneurial skills and interest inventory. DepEd earlier noted that the number of examinees this year increased by 20 percent to 1.5 million, from 1,223,465 examinees in 2007. Of the total number of this year's examinees, 1.2 million are public high school students while only over 300,000 examinees are from private schools. This year's NCAE will also include 1,200 out-of-school youths who are applying for scholarship with the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd). Of the 2007 bunch, 21 students emerged as cream of the crop after obtaining test scores of 99 or above. The results of the exam were released almost three months later, in November 2007. - Mark Merueñas, GMANews.TV