No short cut to success at bar exams –Law School

This is coming on the heels of various attacks against the school authorities by students who failed the August 2014 bar final part two examination. When Daily Trust visited the Bwari head office of the NLS, the DG was said to be outside the country on official assignment to attend the International Bar conference (IBA) […]

This is coming on the heels of various attacks against the school authorities by students who failed the August 2014 bar final part two examination.
When Daily Trust visited the Bwari head office of the NLS, the DG was said to be outside the country on official assignment to attend the International Bar conference (IBA) taking place in Tokyo, Japan.
Outright pass was 57 per cent and 33 per cent failed the exams. Out of a total of 5,841 students who wrote the exams, four had first class honours, 96 had second class upper division, 620 passed with second class lower division while 2,610 graduated with passes.
Out of the number, 501 students had conditional pass in which they failed a subject and 1,932 failed more than one subject in which they will have to repeat all the exams.
The big issue is, however, with the re-sit candidates who had written the bar finals exams about five times. In this category, a total number of 1,335 students wrote the exams, 88 passed, 26 had conditional passes in which they still have a subject to pass while 1168 failed. The question is if these re-sit students have a degree in law, how is it impossible for them to pass a bar exam after attempting it up to five times?
Max-Uba Elizabeth, the Secretary of the Council for Legal Education (CLE) and the Nigerian Law School (NLS) in an interview with Daily Trust in her office said that most of the students who failed were often on the internet watching movies while lectures were going on.
“In the campuses that are close to town, many will not even go to class. They are all over doing what nobody understands. Some will come in and sneak out because they have to sign attendance; perhaps they were able to pass through the university that way,” Elizabeth said.
She said it was amazing that students who failed exams have gone to town with all manner of stories and claims
She shed more light on how the students’ papers were marked.
“The Director General (DG) of NLS does not mark examination papers. The DG did not mark one script. He did not moderate one script. He did not process one script. People designated their work, the result ends on his table. All he is required to do is to ensure that whoever is put in charge at different levels does what is expected of him, and once that is done, I know that there is a level playing field for each candidate’s paper that was marked.
“Each person was examined by at least 10 people who marked each paper. We have five courses and each course has sections A and B. the person who will mark section A of one course doesn’t mark the section B. It is conference marking undertaken by both lecturers and practitioners from outside who come in as external examiners and the same marking scheme is given to every one of them.
“At a certain point when they have finished, we have some senior lecturers, deputy directors and directors who will also go through the scripts that have been marked to ensure that justice has been done to each question in line with the marking scheme and that the scores are properly recorded because we have a computer mark sheet that is going to be scanned”, Max-Uba Elizabeth said.
In a recent interview with the DG NLS, Olanrewaju Onadeko, he had said that one of the areas of concern of the management of the NLS and the Council of Legal Education (CLE) is to improve standard.
“Our mandate is to provide bar vocational trainings for law graduates to enable them become legal practitioners  and we believe that every legal practitioner produced by the NLS must possess sufficient lawyering skills and there  are a number of things been done in the last eight months and more is still being done. I have no doubt that we are going to achieve success but you may not see it yet. It will take a year or so when our products start going out and now utilised that the end users and others will be able to appreciate the changes we are talking about,” he said.
However, some of the students that failed said that they did not know how the school authorities arrived at their final grades.
One of the students who managed to graduate with conditional pass, Audu Stephen, accused the school authorities of changing the rules of the game.
He alleged that the DG wanted to reduce the number of graduates when he cut down the time allotted to various examinations.
Some of the law students who will be writing the final bar part two exams in May 2015 said that the message was clear to them as they have to sit up for the next exams.