My 2 Centavos on the 2012 Philippine Bar Exam and Why the Passing Rate was Low

I've been reading a few editorials and news pieces on the results of the 2012 Philippine Bar Exam.

Some of them I posted here, but just in case, here are a few links with excerpts:

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/377315/17-hurdle-2012-bar-exams

"Lawyer Joan Largo, dean of the University of San Carlos’ (USC) College of Law, expressed dismay over how last year’s bar examinations was conducted.

“The results do not reflect the competence of the bar examinees. The low passing rate in the 2012 bar examinations was really brought about by the unreasonable length of the exam,” she told Cebu Daily News.

Largo said bar examinees were asked to answer a set of 100-point multiple choice questions (MCQ) and another 100-point essay at the same time.

“It was physically and humanly impossible to answer the questions sensibly given the short period of time. It’s really hard. I give credit to all bar examinees,” she said.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/377315/17-hurdle-2012-bar-exams#ixzz2OoubzZ56
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My review table for my 4 years in law school

http://opinion.inquirer.net/49307/lawyer-dominated-society

When the bar exam results were announced on Wednesday, the social media were abuzz with congratulations for friends, but some asked a perennial question: Why all the hoopla for the bar exam, but not for the board exam results for doctors, accountants, engineers, pharmacists, etc.? Why the fixation over one profession, and over a licensing test?

Indeed. After all, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. had long ago said that “the black-letter man may be the man of the present, but the man of the future is the man of statistics and the master of economics.” Why, in the 21st century, are we still enthralled by a profession that “do[esn’t] understand technology and balance sheets” and instead “hires out its words and its anger”?

The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. We have yielded too much power to the government, and that power has found its way to the lawyers. Rather than rely on a free market, we have installed the state as the dispenser of wealth and business opportunities, and assigned the lawyers’ guild as the mediator. So why act surprised that they have aggrandized the power we surrendered to them?

But it isn’t just about power. It’s also about legitimacy. The Marcos dictatorship deglamorized the lawyers by idealizing the technocratic state, elevating an elite of number-crunchers backed by a corps of military bone-crushers. And that is why the heroes of the mainstream anti-Marcos movement were the human rights lawyers of the old FLAG and Mabini. Today, that poetic image of lawyering continues to inspire.

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/49307/lawyer-dominated-society#ixzz2Op4caBTW
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This is the list of 2012 Bar Exam Passers (Disclosure, I'm one of them)
http://www.philstar.com/exam-results/2013/03/20/921986/complete-list-2012-bar-exams-passers

http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/376867/2012-bar-result-is-second-lowest-passing-rate-in-history-sc-committee

The bar examination committee of the Supreme Court on Wednesday said the result of the 2012 bar examination was second lowest passing rate in the history of professional licensure examination for lawyers in the Philippines.

A total of 17.76 percent or 949 out of 5,343 passed the 2012 bar examination, the Supreme Court announced Wednesday. It added 5,686 of examinees but only 5,343 completed the four Sunday examinations.

Read more: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/376867/2012-bar-result-is-second-lowest-passing-rate-in-history-sc-committee#ixzz2Op6vlTOq
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I'm not here to write about those who passed the 2012 bar, but to give context and a theory on why the 2012 bar had such a low passing rate.

For more background on the Philippine bar I suggest you Google "Philippine bar exam wiki".

The Philippine bar before 2011 was in pure essay format. By essay I mean it could be objective enumeration, legal analysis or an opinion, but the answers (the words and sentences) came from your mind and had to be written down on the answer sheet. The questions would give hints through subtle contextual elements to guide you on what kind of answer the examiner was looking for or sometimes the questions were just plainly ambiguous so you had to write all you knew. That was how it was done since the first bar exam in 1900.

There has never been a standard Philippine bar exam. The law, unlike the human body or answers to a mathematical numbers test, constantly changes, evolving with the people as they change. Oliver Wendell Homes Jr. is famous for his quote "the life of law is not logic; it has been experience". The law changes because people change. Women and african-americans used to be disenfranchised a century ago, now they are not because the people and the law changed.

That is why the bar exams change every year. Yes, there are general rules and principles law students must learn, but these change in time, and depending on the examiners and the head of the bar exams for the year, the scope and concentration on particular topics can change i.e. a law passed in the middle of 2012 will most likely not be part of the 2012 bar but, if it is significant enough to affect society (amendments to anti-money laundering), it will come out in the 2013 bar.

The essay-type bar exams usually had twenty questions. Every number could be just one question or have sub-questions ("nanganganak"). The sub-questions could relate to the previous question or the story of the question or have nothing to do at all with the main question or sub-questions.

The Bar exams are usually held on four consecutive sundays. The 2011 bar was held in November. The 2012 bar was held in October. Before then, it was in September, and long ago it was held in October like the 2012. My bar had 8 subjects. 4 were major subjects and 4 were minor. We also had a legal writing portion where we had to craft a legal opinion.

After about a hundred years, I'm guessing it became a bit tedious to conduct and check an exam where the scope kept increasing every year (more laws being passed and more Supreme Court rulings called jurisprudence adding or changing doctrines or principles of law). Adding to the burden was the increasing number of applicants. Back in the early 80's my parents took the bar and they had a passing rate of about 50%. Back then there were about 1700 taking the exam.

In 2011 they tried a pure multiple choice question and answer format (MCQ). The 4 major subjects had 100 MCQ questions each with 4 possible answers given per question. The 4 minor subjects had 75 MCQs. Then they had a legal writing portion to test the applicant's ability to construct a legal opinion or memorandum. Because of the new format the head of the bar exam, Justice Roberto Abad, required all MCQ answers to be noticeably different from each other so that the examinee, if he knew the correct one, could easily pick it out. I'm pretty sure crafting the questions and answers was pretty hard for the examiner because they probably had a pool of more than 100 questions per subject and only compiled them the day before the exam and had to make sure each of the MCQs followed the instructions of Justice Abad.

Bar applicants that year were told to read codals (for non-law people, that means just the text of the laws without annotations from authors) because with such a big pool of questions per subject the only consistent text were the laws themselves. Authors of annotations sometimes have different interpretations of laws. For 2012, we were told to read everything (but not just anything) because of the essay portion.

This was my book queue for the bar (not seen are the books on the reading table and in a box) 

In 2012, there were almost 6,000 applicants.  The format changed again (nice to have guinea pigs), but this time they gave both MCQs and essay tests. The number of questions did not change for each format and the time per test did not increase significantly.

We were allowed to choose which part we wanted to answer first, either the 100 question MCQ or the 20 question (with sub-questions) essay. Having both questionnaires given at the same time and knowing that a variety of topics would be asked in the MCQ, most chose the MCQ to deal with first. I answered the MCQ first because it would be easier to dump all the knowledge on different topics for 100 questions right away than wait till my brain was more tired from answering.

 The problem with answering MCQs is that the brain uses a different process; elimination. I read the question, looked at the answers, and eliminated each, one by one till I was sure the only one left was likely correct. I did this even if I knew the answer already because I knew that the examiners would probably make two answers slightly similar so I had to be sure that I wasn't getting baited too early.

Answering 100 MCQs gets you into a rhythm. When you get to the essay part, your mind has to adjust from just crossing answers off, to creating answers and composing them into coherent and concise sentences. You do not have time to write everything you know (although shotgunning it is safer than not writing anything). If you want to write legibly so that the examiner won't get annoyed reading your answer, you have to write neatly and in big letters. That takes up more time if you're like me and you have chicken scratch for handwriting. Using cursive for me was not safe so I had to write in big letters which took up more time. I do remember writing in script a few answers because I was rushing, but to compensate I wrote in very big letters. My one sentence in cursive looked like a paragraph but at least I was more comfortable knowing that the one checking the exam wouldn't have a reason to not read my answer in whole.

Lets not forget the usefulness of trending. Trending is done both in law school and during the bar. Students and barristers (not to be confused with Starbuck's barristas) look at previous exams and use statistics to see what topics, scenarios and questions tend to come up during tests. The importance of trending is noticeable when you take an essay-type exam. If the trending tips are mostly correct, you have a higher chance of hitting the target grade because you'll be able to focus and study on the topics that matter. If you have 20 essay questions and trending gets 15 questions you will more or less get 75% of the test within the scope of your review, it doesn't necessarily mean you will pass, but at least you'll be within a comfort zone to shotgun answer. In a 100 question MCQ exam, if trending gets 15 questions, you get 15 out of 100. Obviously, trending becomes less useful. Now if you have both essay and MCQ, you pray that the one making the MCQ doesn't know the one making the essay is asking the same thing. That way you can use the MCQ part to answer the essay. If they intentionally make the essay so different in topic from the MCQ, then you've just increased the amount of information the bar examinee has to recall in four hours. I remember feeling that some MCQ questions during my bar were so esoteric that I wondered if the examiner was just running out of common topics to ask so he/she just looked at some obscure-never-taught part of vast Philippine law and just asked it to fill in a quota.

My first language is non-understandable english. My second language is english and tagalog. The bar exam is in english. I know of many brilliant classmates in law school who knew the law but could not read fast enough or express themselves properly in english. If they did, it took them more time. The 2012 bar was a load of english reading and I can imagine hundreds of competent law students translating the question from english to tagalog or bisaya, answering in their first language, then translating their answer back to english in their head, then writing it in concise, understandable and legible english in the answer book. That's a long process when you have about 4 hours to answer everything. Forget it if you don't even know the answer to the question in the first place.

Besides the test, the examinee has to deal with the usual emotional stress and pressure that builds up right before the bar. An applicant has to balance the copious amounts of caffeine and sleep to make sure that on every sunday of test month, their brain is in optimal shape. All the studying won't help if you're too tired or sleepy to comprehend.

The boxes of reading materials for 4 years worth (excluding text books) I read all of it!

In sum, the aspiring lawyer deals with heaps of reading material on topics that change faster than the human body can mutate. The bar is the final step in validating 4 to 6 years of formal studying (If one is not delayed, law school proper is 4 years plus 1 year for bar review). The 2012 bar was longer than previous bars with a scope that required the examinee to recall copious amounts of information in just a short time. Hopefully, future bars will be adjusted to allow those with the dream of becoming a lawyer the opportunity to be an officer of the court.


If you have any questions about the 2012 bar, feel free to tweet me @viclr33