Bar exams and the Legal Education Summit
THE 2018 Bar exams results/ state of legal education.
The results of the 2018 Bar examinations will soon be with us, perhaps within the next three weeks. The nation will again hear shouts of triumph and witness tears of joy from the successful examinees. Masked by the celebratory noise will be the gnashing of teeth and the silent flow of tears from the many more who will fail.
An unprecedented 8,701 Bar applicants registered in 2018, but only 8,156 completed the examinations. Based on post-exams comments, the questions were fair and reasonable.
Despite these favorable comments, no one can predict the overall results with certainty. Historically, only 1 in 4 Bar examinees passes. In 2015, only 26.21% of the 7,146 Bar examinees made it. The passing rate surprisingly jumped to 59.06% in 2016, and settled back to the historical range when 25.5% passed the 2017 examinations.
Exam question difficulty is a major determinant of the overall and individual results. A part of the problem for many examinees, too, is the exams’ wide coverage. Facility with English, together with the checking and the uneven handling of the examinees’ answers, can also be side factors affecting the results.
Likewise considered as major pass/fail predictors are the examinees’ starting potentials and their prelaw and law school preparations. The Legal Education Board (LEB) partly addresses these concerns through the PhiLSAT, the LEB’s national entrance exam.
The PhiLSAT seeks to weed out – even before law school – those who cannot handle the rigors of law studies. Unfortunately, the continuity of the PhiLSAT could now be in doubt as its legality is currently being questioned before the Supreme Court.
The capability of law schools to provide adequate legal education also varies and the variation can be very wide. In the 2015 Bar exams, with 130 law schools participating, the results showed that all Bar candidates of 28 law schools failed, while no more than 10% of the graduates of another 28 law schools passed. Thus, 56 (or 43%) of the 130 participating law schools could not go beyond a 10% passing rate.
Only three law schools had passing rates of 70% and above, and only 10 law schools fell within the 50% to 69% passing rate category. Thus, only 13 law schools (or 10% of the 130 participating law schools) managed to secure passing grades for half of their Bar candidates.
In any language, this record can only be described as abysmal. In legalese, many law schools no longer serve the public interest of educating those aspiring for the legal profession.
The big puzzle for many observers is why the non-performing and the underperforming law schools have continuously been allowed to operate despite their records and despite the regulatory presence of the CHED and the LEB. In the last 30 years, the number of law schools even increased.
In 1989, the country only had 57 law schools. This number increased to 75 in 2002. As of 2015, 140 law schools were listed with 130 of them sending their examinees to the Bar exams.
These numbers, viewed from the perspective of Bar exams performance, are very disturbing.
The effect is to train our students for the legal profession and thereafter, to consign 75% of them – due mainly to the inadequacy or ineffectiveness of our law schools – to careers and futures they have not trained for. We thereby effectively misguide and misdirect our students’ education, waste their time, and waste as well as their parents’ money and resources.
A possible pervasive influencing factor and root of the measly numbers is the regulatory law on legal education – RA 7662, the Charter of the LEB.
This law, passed in 1993, is now 26 years old. Significantly, despite the need for its immediate implementation, the LEB only became operational in 2009 or 16 years later. Active LEB regulation therefore is now only in its 10th year.
Under this law, the LEB is identified with the CHED instead of the Supreme Court which has the constitutional mandates to admit applicants to the Bar (based on Bar exam results) and to supervise all lawyers.
The absence of any direct linkage between the LEB (the legal education regulatory agency) and the Supreme Court (the Bar admission entity) has been leaving a wide and disastrous gap where 75% of Bar admission applicants have been falling annually.
Perhaps the time is now ripe to revisit RA 7662 and to realign its terms with current realities. This is a role that only Congress can undertake but the concerned agencies – the LEB and the Court – can do a lot to assist Congress in the law’s review.
Legal Education Summit
One of the major initiatives that Chief Justice Lucas Bersamin announced soon after he assumed office is the convening of a Legal Education Summit to take a close and serious look at legal education and the Bar examinations.
The summit is scheduled to be held in July of this year under its chairman, Associate Justice Alexander Gesmundo, who has started the ball rolling by promptly convening a preparatory committee.
The committee is now busy planning for regional consultation conferences this May – three in Luzon, two in Mindanao, and one in the Visayas – preparatory to the main Summit in July.
Hopefully, the committee will establish a website through which the interested sectors of the public and the summit participants can have the benefit of relevant legal education/ Bar admission data and can follow the summit developments.
The aim of the Summit is to come up with recommendations addressing the perceived problems on legal education and the Bar examinations, and to submit these recommendations to the appropriate authorities – to the LEB on legal education concerns, and to Congress on the possible amendment of RA 7662. The court itself intends to amend the Rules of Court (Rule 138), guided by the Summit results in the exercise of its discretion, in order to streamline Bar admission and the conduct of the Bar exams.
Knowing how sensitive the court is about competence and conduct in the legal profession, future Bar examinees cannot perhaps look to the coming summit as an opening for easier admission to the Bar.
The Summit’s intent, in my view, is qualitative, not quantitative. The ultimate aim is for the enhanced quality of justice that the judiciary and the legal profession can offer the nation. This can only be achieved through effective legal education and rational Bar exams.