The results of this year’s CLP examinations which took place in July 2006 had the lowest passing rate in its history. Apparently, only an estimated 10% passed the exam in totality, out of around 1000 entrants. Furthermore, the 10% includes an unknown number of entrants who had failed it initially.
There have been numerous letters written in by concerned entrants and their parents to the mainstream press as well as Malaysiakini recently with regard to this numerical discrepancy. In reply, this author has caught at least two letters which defend the examinations. The crux of these letters mention that the failure rate is high due to the mental parity of students who are taught in a rote education system; to remember answers rather than to devise them on their own. According to these letters, this method has no place in the CLP, and for a legal system such as ours we should not allow law students who do not have the appropriate legal mind to become members of the Bar. Though this argument has its own merit, it is nevertheless still unlikely that it is the main reason for 90% of CLP entrants to fail. This author doubts what it infers: that only 10% of entrants embody a proper legal mentality.
Going into detail, it has come to this author’s knowledge that there are mainly five ‘papers’ which entrants have to sit for. If the entrant fails at least 2 of these papers, he is required to wait for a whole year before having to sit for all five of the papers again. Furthermore, upon receiving his results, the entrant unfortunately faces the ignominious prospect of never knowing how well or badly he fared in a paper despite what appears to be arbitrary and undefined grades which are stated in the results.
It is the Legal Profession Qualifying Board, or the Lembaga Kelayakan Profesion Undang-Undang, which oversees the conduct of the CLP. However, their level of involvement with the examination itself is unknown, as there are numerous external parties which intersect with the progress of entrants. It is understood that the Qualifying Board does not involve itself in the education aspect of the exams, i.e it does not tutor students in conventional classes. Furthermore, it also appears to hire people of a legal or judicial stature to prepare the questions for use in the examinations. Another group of like-minded people are also brought in to mark entrants’ transcripts. It is then no surprise that many aspects of the CLP become skewed and inconsistent along the way; students have to go through what is taught at local universities which offer CLP classes, an external group of people who have prepared the questions and another group who mark the answers and finally the Qualification Board itself. The involvement of so many parties is indeed a far cry from the preparation of other exams.
It is evident that, through numerous statements by the Qualification Board, the poor results are not the consequence of any policy of limiting the number of passes, and that there is no such vetting process. However, given the poor passing rate of the CLP over the years, one has to wonder what really is the problem. Could it truly be the quality of the students? Are our law students that incompetent? Should we blame foreign universities, seeing as how there is a large proportion of them who are foreign graduates? If this is so, is the CLP then so deserving of quality that law students who graduated from British universities are having an easier time passing the English Bar Examinations instead?
- This author wishes next year’s CLP students good luck, though that may be irrelevant.
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