The time has come for the government and Parliament to intervene in matters regarding the conduct of examinations for students at the Ghana School of Law (GSL), Moses Foh Amoaning, a senior Law Lecturer at the GSL has said.
According to him, the current situation confronting legal education is beyond the control of the General Legal Council (GLC) therefore, the government and the legislature must step in to deal with the problem.
Angry students of GLS have expressed misgivings regarding the results of the 2017 Bar exams in which only 91 students out of 474 students, representing 19 percent of the total students passed.
The students on Wednesday, 21 February 2018, wore red armed bands to protest against the development.
Out of the 474 students who wrote the exams, a total of 206 are to repeat the entire course after failing. Another 177 students have been referred in one or two papers.
The Student Representative Council (SRC) of GLS is convinced the results could not have been the true reflection of the exams written by the students.
The SRC is therefore demanding remarking of all the failed papers with a drastic reduction in the remarking fee from GHS3000 to GHS500.
Speaking on this matter in an interview on Accra FM Thursday, 22 February 2018, Mr Amoaning said: “Some of us saw this problem coming and spoke about it but we were not listened to. I think the General Legal Council is rather interested in running the law school instead of focusing on regulating the legal profession. They have virtually taken over the running of professional legal education from the law school.
“I think the government and parliament should step in. There should be a bigger stakeholder dialogue on this matter.”
He continued: “There were some reforms in legal education that we didn’t get right. For instance if you want to remove and add different courses to legal education in the country, you needed to have done an academic audit to find out whether these courses we are introducing or removing from the system will help the country’s professional legal education or not. We didn’t ask questions like these.
“Courses like Banking & Finance, Insurance Law, taxation and Industrial law were all removed from the legal education but we didn’t ask questions before removing them. That is one aspect of the reforms we didn’t do well.”
On the conduct of examinations by the Independent Examinations Body (IEB), Mr Amoaning said: “Some of us wrote to the General Legal Council that this will create a problem for the country. The Independent Examinations Board is not known to statutes.
“The GLC should have gone to parliament to Amend Act 32 when it decided to introduce the IEB. Failure to do that made the IEB an illegal body and the Supreme Court has made that clear.
“Some of us cautioned the GLC on this matter but they didn’t listen to us. I wrote to the Director of Legal Education to draw his attention to the fact that the Supreme Court has declared the IEB an illegal body and so they should rather allow the Ghana School of Law itself to conduct its own examinations but they didn’t listen to me.”
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