Passion For Reason
Confessions of a bar examiner
By Raul Pangalangan
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:01:00 04/04/2008
Filed Under: Board Exams
MANILA, Philippines—The first time I was a bar examiner was more than 15 years ago, when I was a young and, by happenstance, strict grader. In the most recently conducted exams, I served once again as a bar examiner likewise in my favorite subject, Political Law and Public International Law.
I have been told that professors mellow with age and, in the campaign slogan of the elder George Bush, become "kinder, gentler" as the years pass. And then I learned that my subject had one of the highest passing rates, at almost 65 percent, where the overall rate for all the subjects combined was 23 percent. I didn't realize how much I had mellowed, how much I'd aged. (Or maybe now I think like a ... parent!)
Since 1999, I have taken part in several reform committees convened by the Supreme Court to improve the bar examinations. The Philippines is unique worldwide in that law schools gear their teaching toward what Saddam Hussein (to give equal billing to George Bush's Public Enemy No. 1) would have called "the mother of all exams."
The Filipino fascination with the bar exams can be understood as part of the cultural fixation, especially in our part of Asia, for competitive and highly secret examinations. I was in Shanghai last week, and the slide show contained a photograph of the ancient examination rooms for the aspiring mandarins to serve the imperial bureaucracy. The confidentiality of the exams was such that, in order to ensure absolute isolation for the examinee and the integrity of the questions, the examinees would live for the three days of the examination inside a small cabin, bringing along their food, water and waste bucket. It was said that if an examinee died, they would just throw his body over the fence rather than sully the integrity of the mandarinate process by letting strangers into the area.
Those exams produced a new elite based not on noble birth but on noble virtue, and, I venture, that is what the bar exams represent for the Filipino. Its entire design embodies this meritocratic ideal: The exams are blind-graded, the examiner does not know whose paper he is grading, their identities (examiners and examinees alike) are revealed only at the end of process and by authority of the Supreme Court. My fellow examiners and I have been "denial kings" the past year.
In the past, the main challenge posed to bar exam reforms was how to keep the confidentiality of the questions, a headache in a country where a whole industry thrives of bar review centers, "bar ops," and the systematic trading of "tips" (and I rejoice that I didn't hear of any "reliable tips" for my subject). Sure, there was a 2003 leakage when the bar examiner, a legal expert but a computer klutz, saved his top secret questions in the shared files of the office mainframe. But apart from that, the bar exams have been administered with the highest professionalism (as I can attest, having worked closely with Bar Confidant Cristina Layusa these past six months).
Today the real challenge comes from an entirely different direction: our increasing population (thanks to the uncontrolled exercise of reproductive rights—Aba, human rights yata 'yan!), the shortage of lawyers to provide basic legal services, and the corresponding increase in bar examinees. The present system of the solitary bar examiner was designed for a time when the examinees numbered just a few hundreds, or even one or two thousand. By last year, there were 5,631 examinees. How far can this system push the solitary examiner to read and check 5,750, then 6,000, then, 6,500, and so on? How much longer can we bury our heads in the sand and pretend that this system is viable in the long run?
We must take the same path taken in the United States: multiple-choice questions and machine-corrected exams. This was already proposed by former Supreme Court Justice Vicente V. Mendoza, but it will entail a radical redesign of the process. Multiple-choice questions are best vetted through a panel of examiners and testing professionals—so there goes the solitary examiner and this whole system of cloak-and-dagger secrecy.
In response, it has been argued that essay questions are needed to judge the candidate's facility with language and ability to analyze and to explain. Then, I argue, let's retain a 20 percent essay portion for the exam, but mainly to test expressive abilities. In other words, let's not overburden the whole process when all we want to target is a specific ability.
In Political Law and Public International Law, I can say that the candidates' ability to express themselves was satisfactory and that there were only a few who I felt were hopelessly unable to put their thoughts to paper. I also do not share the lament that their mastery of the English language has declined. If at all, my problem was that some examinees loved to use so much Latin that I was tempted to ordain them into the priesthood. The true problem was not language but attitude: that a lawyer had to use archaic expressions as if the function of words was not to reveal but to conceal. (But concealment is the virtue of the season, heh?)
Finally, the low overall passing rate does not mean that the 2007 examinees were inferior. The appreciation of answers, that is to say, how the answers are graded, depends largely on the philosophy and approach of the examiner. In my case, after more than 20 years of teaching, I am resigned to the limits of exams as a gauge of genius, and I often remind myself that, in reading an exam answer, I am looking basically for a Salieri, the Austrian imperial composer-able, sound and competent—and should exalt if, along the way, I discover the lyric, the uplift, the spirit-soaring of a Mozart.
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