Thursday, 28 March

2,034 out of 2,824 fail law entrance exam

Education
Lawyers

Over 2,000 candidates who sat the 2021 Ghana School of Law entrance exam, failed.

Out of the total 2,824 candidates who wrote the exam, only 790 passed representing 28 per cent.

In 2019, only 128 candidates out of a total of 1,820 passed the exam.

In 2017, 500 students were admitted to the school, with 450 students admitted in 2016.

Critics have said the low pass rate is a deliberate attempt by the General Legal Council to restrict people from gaining access to legal education to become lawyers.

The fears of critics dovetails into what former Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo said two years ago.

She signalled that as long as she supervised legal education in Ghana and the judicial system, she will not allow the mass production of lawyers in the country, as it poses a great danger to the country.

Addressing the Bench, Bar and Faculty Conference at the Labadi Beach Hotel on the theme: "The Changing Landscape in the Law – the Judge, the Lawyer and the Academic", the Chief Justice then said any attempt to allow the production of lawyers without efficient control, checks and balances will be rejected irrespective of whom is advocating.

In her address, Justice Akuffo noted that: "Those of us who have been too long on the General Legal Council, those of us who spent too long on the disciplinary committee, we’ve cause to worry because the kinds of misconduct are such that there is no way anybody envisaged these categories of misconduct when the Legal Profession Act was being enacted in the 1960s."

Focusing on her concerns about legal education in Ghana, Justice Akuffo said: "Those of you lawyers and those of you lecturers who are busy advocating free scale, mass admissions into the professional law course, and mass production of lawyers, be careful what you wish for." "So long as I have anything to do with it, it won't happen,” she added.

"Just like you can't mass-produced doctors and surgeons, Ghanaians must not have mass-produced lawyers imposed on them," she said.

Meanwhile, there have been calls for a reform of legal education in Ghana but nothing has been done to push that agenda.

 

Source: Classfmonline.com