All roads – for aspiring lawyers and members of the legal profession – will lead today to Espana Boulevard in Manila as over 6,000 bar candidates from different law schools take one of the country’s toughest professional licensure exams.
The battery of exams will begin today at the University of the Santo Tomas (UST) and will continue for the three succeeding Sundays, said Supreme Court spokesman Theodore Te.
The bar is the only professional licensure exams that is not administered by the Professional Regulations Commission.
Associate Justice Diosdado Peralta is the chairman of this year’s bar.
There are more retakers than first-time examinees this year: 3,229, or 50.9 percent of examinees are repeating the exams, while 3,115 or 49.1 percent are first-timers.
This year’s bar exams is the first since the high court removed the cap on retakes and lifted its five-strike rule.
Last year, only 1,174 out of the total 5,593 examinees or 22.18 percent passed the bar.
Many bar candidates from Cebu took their review classes in Manila. Students and professors of Cebu-based law schools who are involved in the so-called Bar Operations have already flown to Manila to lend moral and material support to their bets.
Jonathan Capanas, dean of the University of San Jose-Recoletos’ College of Law, said they are assisting over 80 candidates who graduated from the university.
“Volunteer students are attending to their needs. Every weekend, we send a team of professors to guide them. We are doing something to enhance the knowledge and skills of students,” Capanas said.
Executive Justice Gabriel Ingles of the Court of Appeals Cebu Station urged the Cebuano bar candidates to do their best and to pray harder.
“My advice to them is to study as if passing the bar totally depends upon their own effort, and to pray as if everything depends on God,” said Ingles, who is also a law professor at the University of San Carlos’ (USC) College of Law.
In last year’s bar exams, USC’s Tercel Maria Mercado-Gephart placed fifth while Manuel Elijah Sarausad from the University of Cebu finished sixth.
Bar codes
The Supreme Court will also be using bar codes beginning this year. Under the scheme, examination booklets will have bar codes to easily track them down.
“For the 2014 and succeeding bar examinations, the ‘name card’ utilized in previous examinations has been replaced by a ‘bar code’ system.
The shift was made to modernize the conduct of the examinations to make the process of checking, encoding and decoding the examination booklets faster and more secure,” the SC said in a briefer sent to the media.
Bar confidant Cristina Layusa said the new bar code system would help better ensure the integrity of the exams.
“There will be two bar codes: one on the cover and another one inside. So in case something happens—there’s a little (damage) on one sheet—there’s another one. The name of the candidate will be on the bar code,” she said in a press briefing.
“Head watchers in charge of the seating plan in the room will call [the examinee]. He will be given his notebook, then the bar code on the second sheet will be peeled off and then pasted on the seating plan [for that particular room],” she explained.
Layusa said the bar codes would replace the old system, where examinees’ name cards were inserted in exam sheets to properly tag their booklets.
The bar code system is one of two innovations the Supreme Court is introducing this year. Earlier this week, it announced that exam takers would be required to use clear or see-through bags for their belongings.
The high court said this system was adopted “considering the number of examinees and to speed up the inspection of bags and personal belongings of the examinees before entering their respective rooms assigned, and to further ensure the safety and security of the examinees and bar personnel.”
Layusa said the high court would give some leeway on Sunday and allow examinees without clear bags to enter exam rooms, as they might have missed this week’s announcement.
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