The Attorney General, Gloria Akuffo, has backed calls for an enquiry into the recent mass failure of students at the Bar exams.
Her comments follow a 30-day ultimatum issued to the Independent Examination Board (IEB) by the SRC of the Ghana School of Law to re-mark the scripts of students who failed the exams.
Only 91 out of the 474 students who sat the bar exams written in May and September last year passed.
The students have since been protesting the results and have planned to petition the Chief Justice.
Speaking on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana, Gloria Akuffo said an investigation would help unravel the true cause of the mass failure.
“Let us investigate what is the real cause of this large numbers. Is it because lecturers are not good enough? Is it because they do not have good material? Is it because the students themselves are not applying themselves efficiently and begin to find solutions to these.”
‘Parliamentary inquiry’
Her suggestion comes a day after a lawyer, Kwaku Asare, also called on Parliament to investigate the mass failure.
Mr. Asare also made a number of calls including asking Parliament to summon the Director of the Ghana School of Law to explain why they “unlawfully denied access to about 3,000 students who under the laws of Ghana are qualified to have professional legal education.”
The lawyer also called for the setting up of a committee of legal examiners by Parliament to “review the examination, the marking scheme and the exams scripts to find out what has gone terribly wrong with these examinations.”
The massive failure comes at a time when Parliament is debating an LI brought before it by the General Legal Council (GLC); the body that oversees the legal profession and legal education in Ghana.
The LI, if endorsed by Parliament, will see the legalization of entrance examination and interview processes by the GLC for prospective law students.
‘Re-mark exam scrips, scrap exam board’
In the wake of this development, the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) of the Ghana School of Law, has also called for the examination scripts of the Ghana Law School students to be re-marked.
Speaking on Eyewitness News, the President of the school’s SRC, Sammy Gyamfi, said the results did not accurately reflect the performance of the students who sat for the exams.
He stated that in order to ensure the integrity of the exams and the results which were released, the scripts have to be re-marked by “a credible and independent body.”
“Clearly this is a sad day for professional legal education for Ghana. The published results are very dispiriting and discouraging, very disappointing and clearly unacceptable. The results as we have now don’t reflect the true performance of the students. We can’t vouch for the integrity of these results, the integrity of the results is questionable,” he said.
