Bar test chairs for 2019, 2020 vow ‘very reasonable examination’
MANILA, Philippines — Both the 2019 and 2020 Bar Exam Committee chairpersons have promised a “very reasonable examination.”
The Bar examination is a gruelling month-long examination conducted on four consecutive Sundays of November with two subjects per Sunday.
The 2019 Bar exam chairperson is Supreme Court Associate Justice Estela Perlas-Bernabe while the 2020 Bar exam chairperson is Supreme Court Associate Justice Marvic Leonen.
“The usual wide scope of the Bar examinations allowed too much unpredictability that tended to throw the examinees off balance,” Bernabe said noting that the examination itself is already physically and mentally taxing.
Speaking during the Legal Education Summit on Wednesday, Bernabe said she is filtering the questions to make sure that there will be no “unfair trivia questions” or questions that tend to mislead the examinees.
“I have earlier intimated, the bar exams should not be made intentionally difficult for extraneous reasons. Institutional measures should be set to ensure that the Bar remains true to its purpose as the licensure exam for the legal profession. It should be a fair test of the candidate’s aptitude and readiness for actual legal practice,” Bernabe said.
For his part, Leonen belied rumors that the 2020 examination will be “unreasonable.”
“It will be very reasonable. Any intelligent, coherent justice will want the Bar to simply be a qualifying exam. It is not an exam to find out the most brilliant of lawyers. It is only an exam to add into our ranks those lawyers that deserve to practice,” he said.
“Mag-postpone na kayo, sa akin na kayo kumuha,” Leonen added in jest.
To date, Bernabe said the Supreme Court’s Office of the Bar Confidant has already received around 4,000 petitions to take the 2019 Bar and they are expecting numbers to increase as the deadline is still on August 15.
In 2018, a total of 8,155 examinees completed the four-Sunday examination. Some 1,800 of the 8,155 takers have passed the Bar examination. /kga
RELATED STORIES
SC Justice Leonen vows 2020 bar exam to have higher passing rate
2020 bar exam chair eyes possible ‘pass-or-fail’ system
