My Take On The Recent PRC Real Estate Broker Exam

The other Saturday was when we held the victory party of all those who passed the Real Estate Broker (REB) Licensure Exam. 

According to Papa, a shade over 50% of the number of examinees nationwide passed the exam. That is remarkable and though I’m happy with the outcome (I passed after all), let me give some inputs on how the exam should be.

I spoke to a practicing broker who took the exam back when it was still administered by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). Back then, she said, the exam was in essay form. Also, the exams then sported a lower passing rate. For instance, for her batch, only 8 of 30 examinees nationwide passed it.

Of course, I’m not suggesting the reversion of the exam from its current multiple choice format back to essay type. The number of examinees now prevents that. But there are still ways to approximate the depth of knowledge being tested by the latter exam type.

But first, my suggestions:

Pasado

Last night, I received good news: I passed the Real Estate Broker exam.

The way I received it was funny though. For the entire week, I kept checking, almost to the point of obsession, if the results were already posted. Then, on Friday night, I left my phone in the hospital room where my sister was recuperating from her Cesarean operation. When I came back after buying food, Papa was scrolling his phone looking for my name in the list of passers released by Rappler.com (I would learn later that someone had congratulated him ahead of time). I remembered saying something, “Ayaw na’g asa lagi” before he announced that my name was on the list: Bataller, Paolo Ray Evangelio.

Coffee Shops

The first time I went inside one was when I stumbled into the now-defunct Panadero coffee shop along Roxas Boulevard. A late bloomer, I was working already back then. I just thought one afternoon, “I could probably afford a cup of coffee”, checked my wallet, and went inside. I spent the next few hours slowly sipping ridiculously expensive chocolate mocha, watching NBA live on my laptop, and glancing at the college girls across the table. It was the best social climbing experience I had.

To Comfort The Grieving

How do you comfort someone?

They never taught that skill in school, presuming that we’ll learn that later in life. We also presumed that we just had to mimic the adults around us. Like motherhood, many of us simply presumed that comforting someone would come naturally.

Like most presumptions, I was wrong.

The New Risk That Philippine Banks Face

I think this risk applies to Philippine banks as well. 

Here's an excerpt from a Quartz' article by Mark DeCambre:

Forget arcane mortgage bonds, toxic derivatives or a swiftly shifting regulatory landscape.

There’s a new systemic risk for the banking system to worry about. Or perhaps you might say, an operating systemic risk.

The Federal Reserve is warning US banks to prepare for a looming April 8 deadline, at which point Microsoft has stated that it will be ending its support for Windows XP, the operating system created in 2001. That means the tech company will no longer offer security patches—fixes which address potential vulnerability to cyberattack—or tech assistance. Microsoft has been urging its customers to switch to Windows 8.1.

Windows XP is used to run everything from some bank’s internal computers to automated teller machines (ATM). In fact, the Microsoft operating system serves as the backbone for 95% of the ATMs operated in America, Bloomberg reports. So losing Microsoft tech support may translate into heightened security problems for financial institutions.

Read the rest of the article here.