Over 2,000 students fail Ghana School of Law entrance exams

Two thousand and thirty-four (2,034) Ghana School of Law entry candidates who sat for the 2021 entrance exams have failed to enter into the country’s only institution for training professional legal practitioners.

Of the 2,824 candidates, only 790 students, representing 28%, passed the exams. The figure is a 10% drop from the total number of LLB candidates who passed in the previous year. Last year, 1,045 out of 2,763 students passed the 2020 exams.

In 2019, only 128 candidates out of 1,820 passed the exams, while in 2018, only 9% of the students were said to have passed the bar exam. Also, 500 students were admitted into the school in 2017, with 450 students admitted in 2016.

The poor pass rates have become a recurrent subject for national discussions, with many calling for measures to curb the phenomenon to increase the number of lawyers in the country.

Aspiring lawyers cautioned over country to further their legal education

Meanwhile, the Students Representative Council (SRC) President of the school, Wonder Victor Kutor, has advised LLB candidates to be cautious of the country they select to further their legal education.

This, he said, was to avoid the problem of being rejected after passing out from a country that Ghana’s legal system does not recognise.

Speaking in an interview monitored by The Ghana Report on Metro TV on Tuesday, September 28, Kutor said the candidates would have to check properly which institutions they are going to.

He explained that normally what happens is that when some are unable to enter the law school, they go to other jurisdictions only to return and become aware that where they studied was not recognised by the country’s legal system.

“I want to give this advice to the public, and to our colleagues who have not been able to enter (the law school) that we know of such individuals who went to Rwanda  and came back, but were not  admitted for post call. They had to go to the Gambia and when they came back Gambia is recognised, and they were admitted,” The School of Law SRC president explained.

An all-inclusive approach needed to tackle failure rate

On the issue of mass failure, Kutor argued that failing an examination was not an indication that the students were below standard.

As such, he has called for an all-inclusive approach in dealing with the causes of the mass law school entrance examination failure in order to be able to deal with the situation properly.

“You leave school in July and sit for exams in August and you are doing, let us say taxation or land law, and you go and meet tort and constitutional law, if you haven’t revised enough, you will fail.

“So, we need to have a discussion as a nation. When students graduate in July you allow them to wait and apply the following year,” Kutor explained

Protest over mass failure

In the past, law students have staged street protests against the mass failure, and presented a petition to Parliament to get the General Legal Council to address what they termed as a “systemic problem” at the Ghana School of Law.

Key among their concerns were the mass failure, the fees charged for resit and remarking, as well as the policy of rewriting all papers if a student fails more than three papers.

Admission to the Ghana School of Law for professional legal education requires that successful candidates obtain a minimum rank of 50%.

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