MANILA, Philippines – So many Filipinos want to work abroad and demand for them around the world is so great that nursing schools have been opening at a feverish pace.

There were 420 nursing schools in the country as of early December, up from 370 at the start of 2005. In 1970, this nation had 140 nursing schools.

Now, a cheating scandal threatens to tarnish the value of Philippine nursing degrees and has led to calls for a crackdown on diploma mills.

Last June, about 42,000 graduates took the Philippine national nursing exam, and 17,000 passed. But the test answers were floating among several hundred students via mobile phone text messages and the Internet.

In this red-hot market, some of the exam coaches competing for customers boasted that they had inside information on what would be asked on the test.

More than 400 students who took the test protested the cheating. It now seems that the answers leaked from the exam administering board. The complaining test takers alleged that the mastermind of the cheating was a man who owns a nursing school and a test preparation school. At the time, he was also the head of the national nurses association.

George Cordero resigned as president of the nurses association but has denied the charges. He declined an interview request.

Philippine President Gloria Arroyo replaced all the members of the nursing exam board, and investigations continue.

Glenda Vargas, dean of the nursing school at the University of Santo Tomas, leads an effort to have all those who passed take the test again. An appeals court asked 1,687 to retake the test, but Dean Vargas has gone to the Supreme Court asking for an order requiring everyone to do it again.

"The only thing we want is to clean up that exam," she said. "In any class, when you suspect cheating, the only thing to do is take the test over again."

Others say cleaning up the exams won't be sufficient to restore the country's reputation.

Alice Dometiza-Hoffman, nurse manager for day surgery at the Baylor Medical Center at Irving, came to Dallas from the Philippines in 1975. She regards the exam cheating as a disgrace.

"It's the government of Philippines' fault for allowing the proliferation of nursing schools. They should be doing more screening and accreditation to weed out the diploma mills," she said.

Annabelle Borromeo, acting dean of the nursing school at Manila's Far Eastern University, worked in Houston for 23 years before returning home. She also wants the worst schools closed.

"We've had a hard time closing them. They have political influence," she said. "So all we can do is screen the graduates as we know how – through the exams."

There aren't enough good teachers and administrators to staff all of the nursing academies, which is one reason students use the test preparation schools.

At the College of Nursing of Manila's Makati Medical Center, there are 876 students but only 15 full-time faculty, said Dean Eden Cacanindin. To round out the staff, Makati relies on 60 part-time instructors who work as hospital nurses or teach at other schools.

"The U.S. demand for nurses is so strong, there will be other nursing schools opening here," said Dean Cacanindin. "There's a dire need for deans. Some schools want to hire you to be the dean of two schools at once."

"My fear is we might fall into the trap of producing substandard nurses," she said. "Then you [Americans] will not hire our nurses. You will hire nurses from India and China instead."

E-mail jlanders@dallasnews.com