Passion For Reason: Bar exam reforms
By Raul Pangalangan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 21:16:00 03/25/2010
Filed Under: Board Exams, Judiciary (system of justice)
THE RESULTS OF THE BAR EXAMINATIONS will be out Friday, the Supreme Court has announced. For those who make it, Friday night will feel like an early Christmas. For those who don’t, it will be an early Biyernes Santo. But for all of them, the entire bar review process and the painful waiting for the results would have been sheer Calvary, because the Philippine bar examinations are the most unpredictable and unscientific licensing examination I know.
And when I describe how unreliable it can be, do you know the typical Pinoy reaction? “Then the result must be God’s will!”
Oo nga naman. If you’re that lucky, it’s got to be destiny! That attitude, in fact, is one big hurdle for anyone trying to reform the antiquated bar exams. How does one tamper with what the heavens ordained?
For the most recent bar exam, the Supreme Court has taken one bold organizational reform. Now we have two bar examiners for each subject instead of just one. It was a laudable measure but one that unfortunately did not produce the desired result.
Laudable, because it confronted one undeniable fact: there are more and more bar candidates each year, hovering at around 6,000 takers for the past several years already (this, year, 5,903 to be exact). The system of the solitary bar examiner grading all the exam booklets was designed for an earlier time when there were much fewer takers. Splitting that task between two graders made eminent sense.
Unfortunate, because instead of getting the grades sooner by cutting the “checking time” by half, we are now back where we started: it has taken just as long to check the exam booklets. Why? Because the two bar examiners merely submitted two sets of questions, and the exam simply became almost twice as long.
The experiment would have worked had the exam kept to fewer questions. And may I add, the questions should be bundled together in, say, one factual problem with three sub-questions, for a total of 10 percentage points. That way, we strike a balance. Too few questions and the examinee runs the risk of being caught on the few points of law that he didn’t study. Too many, and the examinee runs out of time to answer them all. Worse, the weights assigned perforce are limited to 2 or 3 points for each question. A perfect answer gets a 3, but anything less than perfect gets a 2—technically a grade of 66 percent in an exam where the passing grade is 75 percent. It’s just impossible to grade such questions fairly.
I hope this gentle critique doesn’t deter further experimenting with bold reforms. There are basically two sets of proposed reforms. The first focuses on the substance of the exam, the nature of the questions asked (e.g., avoid rote memory, use problem-based questions using cases, avoid questions on esoteric points of law). The second set focuses on how the bar exam is administered (e.g., who makes the questions, how he or she grades the answers, or how the passing grade is fixed).
The first kind of reform is more difficult. UP law professor Florin Hilbay, ranked 1st in the 1999 bar examinations, Yale LL.M. and now vice chair of Bantay Katarungan, published an essay in the Integrated Bar of the Philippines Journal entitled “The Flunker: The Bar Exams & The Construction of the Filipino Lawyer.” He says that the bar exam “suffers from an identity crisis—it does not know what it’s really for.” It is a “licensure exam,” “a filtering mechanism that weeds out [the in]competent.” But it is also a measure of “some vague potential” for genius.
The bar exam cannot achieve one goal without sacrificing the other. A “pass/fail” grading system will serve the winnowing out function but not the mother-of-all-battles fetish. We test on too many bar subjects, instead of focusing on the main subjects that embody the core competencies needed by a young lawyer. Hilbay says that this “transforms intelligent young Filipinos into zombies walking along the corridors of law schools memorizing voluminous texts” and has reduced the bar exam into “nothing more than a national quiz bee on statutes and decided cases.”
The second kind of reform is actually what the recent change addresses, the sociology of who asks the questions and grades the answers. This is where the real uncertainty and arbitrariness comes in because each year, there are new bar examiners, who in turn are left unchecked if they ask idiosyncratic questions or apply unrealistic grading patterns. (There was a year when one examiner passed less than 1 percent in his subject, and another less than 7 percent!) That is why Justice Vicente Mendoza has proposed a standing committee of examiners and graders.
Finally, I implore all law deans to stop bar candidates from calling themselves “barristers.” When I go abroad and meet real barristers—especially the Queen’s Counsels—I shudder at the prospect that they will discover how benighted Filipinos have debased the term to mean mere aspirants for the lawyers’ guild.
The error is understandable. We have what they call a “unified bar” and make no distinction between solicitors and barristers. But it’s an error nonetheless.
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In my column three weeks ago, I wrote about the “sheer brazenness of [the] ouster” of Philippine General Hospital director Jose Gonzalez. I said: “Gonzalez won by a 5-4 vote.” My numbers were wrong. Gonzalez won 6-5 over the incumbent Carmelo Alfiler.
I was belatedly informed that in fact two additional regents representing the Congress, though absent during the December 2009 meeting, cast their ballots in writing. Rep. Cynthia Villar voted for Alfiler, while Sen. Mar Roxas voted for Gonzalez. By the February 2010 meeting, neither Alfiler nor Gonzalez was voted PGH director. Intriguing, isn’t it?
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Comments to passionforreason@gmail.com
This was lifted from the Philippine Daily Inquirer: http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view/20100325-260785/Bar-exam-reforms
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