Two hundred and eighty-four LLB graduates have failed Ghana’s professional law course examination that would have given them the licence to practise in the country as fully fledged lawyers.
Only 64 of the graduates who sat for the June and September 2018 examination have passed to undertake additional 6-month pupillage before they are called to the Ghana Bar.
Additional 177 graduates have also been referred in the exams, results released by the independent examinations committee of the General Legal Council Tuesday showed.
The over 500 graduates took the exams after going through two years of professional legal education at the Ghana School of Law in Accra.
Those failed will have to take the entire subjects again while the refereed will write the specific subjects they were referred in.
The results will not come as a surprise since it is not the first time law graduates seeking to become practicing lawyers have failed en masse in the professional law examination, which has become an albatross on the neck of hundreds of LLB graduates from the various law faculties in across the country.
Failure an indictment on GLC – Prof
A United States-based Ghanaian professor, Stephen Kwaku Asare, who has been critical of the General Legal Council argues the latest results is “an indictment of the GLC and those in charge of legal education in the country”.
He wondered how after over 10 years of education, millions of cedis of investment, thousands of hours of tuition among others, only 3.2 per cent of the graduates who sat for the exams could become eligible for tutelage
“Here is what I know. If you exported the 2,000 students to any jurisdiction, other than Ghana, over 70 of them will successfully qualify as lawyers in a shorter time,” he said in a Facebook post-Tuesday.
In his view, the problem which has become systematic, cannot lie with the students, noting “If our leaders don’t see this as a problem then I don’t know what they see it as”.
