A Deputy Attorney-General, Joseph Kpemka has defended the integrity of the Ghana School of Law entrance examination results as being authentic after the latest mass failure at the school.
He insisted on Eyewitness News that “no person can influence anything in that exam and any person who passes is strictly on merit.”
“The Independent Examination Committee, which is made up of very high ranking people including retired Supreme Court judges and former chairpersons of the Ghana Bar association and et cetera.”
“For now, it is most unfortunate that the failure level is very high but going forward, we have to find other ways and means to ensure that the system is opened up for many more persons to be able to access the final exam,” the Deputy Attorney General said.
In the recent entrance exam, only 128 of the 1,820 students who sat passed.
Aggrieved students are said to be unable to contest the results because they signed an undertaking prior to sitting for the examination.
Before this, only 64 out of the 525 students who sat for the Bar exam in 2018 passed; with 284 of them failing and 177 being referred.
The entrance exam results brought into focus remarks by Chief Justice Sophia Akuffo, who earlier this year cautioned the General Legal Council to be wary of the numbers of students admitted into the Ghana School of Law.
“Those of you lawyers and those of your lecturers who are busy advocating free scale, mass admissions into the professional law course, and mass production of lawyers, to be careful what you wish for. So long as I have anything to do with it, it won’t happen. Just like you can’t mass produce doctors and surgeons, Ghanaians must not have mass-produced lawyers imposed on them.”
Her comments were viewed as a response to the consistent calls for reforms that would make it easier for students seeking admission from the 14 law faculties nationwide.
Agitations from the Students Representative Council of the School prompted the setting up of a Committee by the General Legal Council to probe mass exams failure at the Ghana School of Law and oversee reforms at the School.