
ABOUT 5,500 aspiring Thomasians trooped to the Sampaloc campus to take the 2025 UST Entrance Test (USTET) on Sunday, Oct. 20.
The first batch of USTET takers consisted of applicants for college, senior high school (SHS), and the Learning-Enhanced Accelerated Program for Medicine (LEAPMed), according to Office for Admissions Director (OFAD) Emelda Dakis.
This figure is nearly half of last year’s first batch of 10,050 examinees.
Compared to the previous USTET, the number of testing areas has been reduced to five buildings from last year’s nine. Building gates opened at 5:30 a.m. for the morning session and 12:30 p.m. for the afternoon session.
Late applicants took the entrance examination at the Tan Yan Kee Student Center.
This year’s USTET is the first to be held since the passage of Republic Act 12006 or the Free College Entrance Examinations Act.
The law exempts indigent students in the top 10% of their graduating class from paying admission fees.
Medical technology applicant Gretel Dimasu-ay said her USTET application fee was waived because of her SHS ranking.
UST waives the fee for applicants who had attained the highest honors in Grade 9 (for SHS applicants) or Grade 11 (for college applicants), as well as for children of UST Manila support personnel.
“It was nice to have taken the exam here in UST because I was able to do so without any [application] fee,” she told the Varsitarian in a mix of English and Filipino. “I had no preparation for this exam because of schoolwork.”
Ryuji Pongco, an applied physics applicant, said the English portion of the USTET was particularly challenging because of the length of the readings that had to be processed in a limited time.
“My preparation for the exam was mostly scanning and viewing some parts of science, so it would be easy for me,” Pongco said.
“The hard part for me in the exam is the English subtests because all the questions are too long to read,” he added.
Coins, broken pencils at tiger statue
After taking the USTET, many examinees flocked to the Plaza Mayor to snap photos with the tiger statue and UST block letters.
However, they soon began to fill the tiger statue’s mouth with coins and surround its base with pencils broken in half, believing that doing so would help them pass the USTET.
UST swiftly cordoned off the Bengal tiger statue with stanchions.
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Facilities Management Office Director Fr. Dexter Austria, O.P. told the Varsitarian that the OFAD was already addressing the matter, and the stanchions were temporarily placed to “prevent damaging the tiger statue.”
Citing OFAD, Austria said the broken pencils will be sharpened and given to the Simbahayan Community Development Office, while the coins will be donated to the Santisimo Rosario Parish Church.
The practice of breaking a pencil and leaving it behind after an examination had also been observed during the University of the Philippines College Admission Test in August, when pencils were left at the foot of the Oblation statue.
The USTET will be administered on five more Sundays at the Sampaloc campus: Nov. 17 (college, LEAPMed, SHS, Junior High School [JHS] and Education High School [EHS], Dec. 15 (college), Jan. 12 (college, JHS, and EHS), Jan, 26 (college), and Feb. 9 (SHS, JHS, and EHS).
Applications will be open until Dec. 31 for college, Oct. 31 for LEAPMed, and Jan. 15, 2025 for SHS, JHS, and EHS. Janica Kate J. Buan and Marco Luis D. Beech with reports from Fernando Pierre Marcel B. Dela Cruz