91 Out Of 474 Law Students Pass Final Bar Exams

Only 91 out 474 law students have passed the final Bar exams at the Ghana School of Law and are expected to be called to the Bar.

Starrfmonline.com has gathered that a total of 206 out of 474 law students are to repeat the entire course for failing to make the grade while a further 177 students have been referred in one or two papers.

The figure represents only a 19 percent pass for this this year’s Final Bar Exams.

This comes at a time when some law students and legal practitioners are resisting the passage of the Legal Profession Regulations 2017 currently before Parliament which seeks to scrutinize entry to the law school.

The concerned groups argue that, the LI, if implemented, will prevent otherwise qualified graduates from pursuing the law program.

The proposed LI among other things, states that the General Legal Council will conduct an entrance exam for the admission of students to the school, and conduct interviews for all applicants who pass the Ghana School of Law Entrance Examination.

Professor Stephen Kwaku Asare, a US-based legal practitioner who is against legalising the entrance exams in a reaction on his Facebook wall stated “the madness of the unruly GLC continues unabated as only 91 out of 474 LLB graduates, selected based on the unlawful entrance examinations and interviews, are deemed qualified to be called to the Bar.

“One more proof that the entrance examinations and interviews are not just illegal and unethical but they are also entirely non-diagnostic. That is, the argument that they are designed to select quality graduates must fail on this performance report.

“Further, this is proof that the Bar exam, as currently administered by the illegal IEB, is a poor assessment tool or that the Ghana School of Law is incapable of training LLB graduates or both.

“Think about it —— only 91 out of the 1,200 law graduates in this cohort are being called to the Bar!!!!”

The Ghana Law School has been criticized for being overly rigid considering that it serves 12 schools providing LLB degrees.

The current training regime limits the intake into the Ghana Law School to under 500 of the about-2000 LLB graduates annually.

In his suit, Professor Kwaku Asare prayed for a declaration that GLC’s imposition of entrance examination and interview requirements for the Professional Law Course violates Articles ll (7) 297 (d) 23, 296 (a) (b) and 18 (2) of the 1992 Constitution.