I belong to a generation of students who had to take and pass multiple exams to get to college. First, there was the National College Entrance Examination. Then, there were the entrance exams to the various colleges and universities. The NCEE necessarily had to come before all the college and university admissions tests because passing the NCEE was a requisite to college enrolment. And it would have been useless to spend on application fees and go through the stressful entrance exams if one did not pass the NCEE in the first place. The NCEE was scrapped in 2004 but it might be resurrected in the form of the Scholastic Aptitude Test that the Commission on Higher Education intends to implement starting next school year.

Do we really need a redux of the NCEE? The rationale behind the NCEE was to determine who were fit for college and who were better off taking vocational courses. I still remember the day the NCEE results came out when I was a high school senior?the celebratory mood among those who passed and the discomfort of not knowing what to say to friends who didn?t. I don?t remember any of those who failed reassessing their options, and seriously, into vocational courses. Many of the girls who did not pass the NCEE ended up getting married and giving birth to one child after another within a year from high school graduation.

The truth is, failing to qualify for college is something more serious and devastating than failing to pass an entrance exam in one or two of the top universities. The first doesn?t leave one with any chance at all to acquire a college degree. And that?s not a small thing in a society that associates a person?s worth with the number of college and post-college degrees he has acquired.

But none of that is the concern of the commission. Its mandate is to make sure that the country churns out qualified college graduates and the imposition of the SAT, harsh as it may seem, fits into that mandate. With the sad plight of public education in the primary and secondary levels, we can be sure that there will be a lot of weeding out. With less high school graduates qualifying for college, the SAT may even put diploma mills out of business after a few years.

But the Education Department is raising issues over the SAT claiming that the National Career Assessment Examinations is already in place and the SAT would merely be a duplication. I don?t agree.

Unlike the NCEE and the SAT, the NCAE is not a pass-or-fail test but merely assesses a student?s strengths and weaknesses and tries to provide professional and vocational options. The NCAE and the SAT are two different tests with different goals and intents. If they result in duplication, that would be the shortfall of the NCAE. Why?

The NCAE is assessory and recommendatory. It seeks to provide options, including vocational options, to the student but it does take into consideration a culture that glorifies college degrees, master?s degrees and PhDs. The way I see it, the NCAE can be so much more but the Education Department does not realize it yet. The NCAE has the potential to finally break the mindset that a lack of college degree is a serious hindrance for success.

See, it is not enough that students be shown that they have options. It is more important to let them know that these are viable options. If the department would widen the scope of the NCAE so that the exams are preceded by seminars, forums and continuing discussions and dialogs to explain to students that vocational school does not mean failure or shame or doom, students might take the results of the NCAE more seriously and feel less dejected should they not qualify for college.

But instead of the Education Department taking a broader perspective of the NCAE, the agency chooses to engage in a squabble with the CHED and its SAT program to the point of belittling the latter. Education Secretary Jesli Lapus contends that the Education Department ?took several months to fine-tune the details of the [NCAE] program starting from the drafting of the guidelines, formulating the test questions up to its implementation? (?Angeles, Lapus clash over test? in Standard Today, Jan. 10, 2008).

Several months of fine-tuning the details and the DepEd missed the fact that last year the NCAE was conducted over three weeks after the UPCAT? My firstborn is a high school senior who took the UP College Admissions Test on Aug. 3 and the National Career Assessment Examinations on Aug. 27. No problem there? Oh, come on. I don?t know of any other university in this country with as many applicants as UP. Since all these applicants specified their chosen courses in their application forms without the benefit of the assessment and recommendations that the NCAE is meant to provide, then, insofar as the UPCAT goes, the NCAE is superfluous.

Aaahh, if only our education officials would broaden their horizons and learn to think out of the box, this country and its future generations would benefit more. Instead, we have them squabbling like little boys and acting like one is trying to take away the other?s toys.

The author blogs at http://houseonahill.net, http://pinoycook.net and http://www.sassylawyer.com