Bar exams are always traumatic. There's the sheer joy of making it through the hurdle, of wanting to scream the most primal sounds from rarely abused vocal chords, of jumping hoops and jacks, every fiber in our being telling us we should celebrate because life is good, because for Pete's sake, we passed the freaking bar! That's right before we realize that right beside you is someone who didn't make it. Oops. What a dampener. The horrible realization that flunking would mean having to dedicate another year to studying. The agony!
That misery was halved, or even quartered, this year when the Supreme Court released the latest results. More than half the examinees passed, in one of the highest ever passing rates recorded in living history. Spectacularly high, considering that during my time, only twelve percent made the cut (me along with it - ahem). And the ice cream in that dessert was, the University of San Carlos took top spot, along with a hundred percent passing rate!
I won't begrudge the successful examinees their success, I am sure they worked hard for it. But the current system does create arguably bizarre situations where brilliant students flunk because they took the exam in an especially difficult year, whereas if they had waited for another year, they might have even topped the exam.
(Of course that's a conjecture. If the brilliant guy waited, the exams could have been even more difficult the next year. It's a bet that doesn't take well to any means of calculating the odds. So maybe the best advice is to just take the damn exam the minute one is fresh out of law school.)
What's not a conjecture is the strange system where different experts are tapped every year, coming from varying backgrounds, and the output of bar questions therefore range from extremely easy to suicidal. That creates a situation almost of unfairness, except of course, there's no getting around the fact that employing the same examiners year in and year out allows for very tempting propositions coming forth from desperate reviewees.
A professor from UP Diliman (which failed to produce a topnotcher this year) was trying to analyze the dismal results of Manila law schools this year, and her theory was that, perhaps, it was due to the fact that one hundred percent of the examiners were sitting justices of appellate courts, unlike in previous years where it was a mix of practitioners, academics, and justices.
That healthy mix would tend to create a mélange of theoretical and practical questions, a stew that may have weeded out the more bookish types of students. With this current crop of examiners, the emphasis of the questions skewed in favor of decisions of the courts. Hence, the unusual outcome, where all ten topnotchers hailed from law schools outside the capital.
As I said, it's a theory. But the delightful fact that we live with today is the possibility (actualized) that Manila doesn't monopolize excellence. (Is this where I slip in the fact that I taught in San Carlos for five years?)
Which doesn't really help with addressing the strange seesaw of passing rates. Why would one year produce twenty percent success rates, and the next produce fifty? Isn't anyone troubled by these disparate figures?
Is there a way to consistently maintain the levels of complexity and difficulty required to finesse good, analytical thinkers from those who merely regurgitate rote answers?
Maybe Artificial Intelligence can get us there. With the wave of machine learning fast coming up on us, technology might just be the answer. And if there are jobs displaced or eradicated as a result of the influx of AI, at least, the thankless job of checking 5,000 exam booklets by a busy human with a family to feed and a career to nurture may very well be one of those occupations that won't be missed by civilization.
But then, we may not even need lawyers at that time.