BOHOL Third District Rep. Kristine Alexie Tutor called on the Commission on Higher Education to conduct a data analysis to trace the alma mater of those who fail the professional level of the Civil Service Commission exam.

Tutor’s call aims to combat the so-called diploma mills.

Tutor, chairperson of the House Committee on Civil Service and Professional Regulation, said that CHEd must be alarmed as to how and why college graduates fail to hurdle the very basic CSC exam.

“This is most probably a chronic symptom of the low standards of diploma mills in both urban and rural areas,” she said in a statement.

Labeled as diploma mills, these are educational institutions that offer substandard programs that often lead to subpar performances in civil service and licensure examinations.

“These diploma mills are opportunistic parasites feeding off hapless students and parents,” Tutor stressed.

The lawmaker said that once a student enters higher education, it becomes the responsibility of the colleges and universities to make up for or compensate for the inadequacies of basic education.

“I believe the bare minimum measure of the quality of college graduates is that they pass the Civil Service exams,” she added.

The solon pointed out that the high failure rate of five out of six examinees in the latest CSC exams was a consequence of the unmonitored prevalence of diploma mills in the country.

According to data provided by Tutor, 83 percent of the examinees for both the professional and non-professional level failed the exams.

“That’s just too high a failure rate, which confirms how all their learning before taking the exam—both academic and experiential—was far from adequate to meet the very basic competencies the exams were designed to measure,” she noted.

The majority of those who failed were found to have difficulty with the items on Math, English grammar, and abstract reasoning, she said.

“If they are in contractual, job order, casual, or volunteer positions, they will likely remain in those situations, look for jobs outside of government, or be entrepreneurs,” she added.