By Rjay Zuriaga Castor
A total of 992 students from West Visayas State University (WVSU) Main Campus will graduate with Latin honors during the university’s commencement exercises today, June 6.
Among these honorees, 49 students will receive Summa Cum Laude honors, 648 will be awarded Magna Cum Laude, and 295 will graduate as Cum Laude.
In total, the main campus has produced 1,689 graduates across its post-baccalaureate, baccalaureate, master’s, and doctoral programs.
The Office of the Registrar reported that 46 will graduate from the summer term, 157 from the first semester of the current academic year, and 1,486 from the second semester.
Dr. Nordy D. Siason, President of the Iloilo State University of Fisheries, Science, and Technology, will be the commencement speaker.
This year’s graduates with Latin honors are fewer compared to last year’s 1,123, which accounted for 74 percent of the total number of students in the batch of 2023. There were 36 Summa Cum Laude graduates in the previous batch.
In WVSU’s batch of 2015, only five graduated as Summa Cum Laude, and only one in the batch of 2014.
This year’s graduating batch experienced online education for two academic years, from 2020 to 2022, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2023, face-to-face classes gradually resumed at WVSU. By 2024, the university implemented a blended or “hybrid” learning approach for undergraduate programs without licensure exams and for graduate programs due to classroom shortages.
Earlier this March, WVSU faced scrutiny due to a confirmed leak in its entrance exam. This issue led the administration to invalidate the initial exam and required 20,925 applicants to retake it on April 14.
The retake results, released in May, indicated that 4,694 applicants are eligible for the university’s undergraduate programs for the 2024-2025 academic year.
WVSU has formed an ad hoc committee to investigate the leakage incident, but the administration has not yet released the investigation results.
