General News of Thursday, 28 February 2019
Source: citinewsroom.com
2019-02-28
Isaac Wilberforce Mensah, immediate past executive, Ghana School of Law SRC
An immediate past executive of the Students Representative Council (SRC) of the Ghana School of Law, Isaac Wilberforce Mensah, says the high number of failures recorded in the final exams is not the result of a lack of preparedness on the part of the students.
According to him, the students put a great deal of work into their studies, even prior to getting into Law School and hence, cannot be accused of a lack of effort.
“There are many things that can account for this. None of them is the inability for students to actually study or to actually take a test. Getting into the school of law itself is hectic enough.”
“I see people studying day in day out. People get to the school at 10 am and leave school at 5 am the next day. It can’t be because of the students,” he said in an interview on Eyewitness News on Wednesday.
Lecturers, including Justices of the Supreme and Appeals Courts, together with some seasoned lawyers are livid over what has been described as the worst Bar exam results recorded in the history of the school.
Only 9 percent of the students reportedly passed the exam. The school has consistently recorded poor results in the bar exams.
The lecturers of the school have threatened to resign en bloc following the mass failure of students who took part in the exams organised by an independent examination council.
Wilberforce who is also the host of Breakfast Daily on Citi TV also said the lecturers are not to blame for the mass failures as they do everything possible to prepare the students for the exams.
“The only new introduction to this system is the people setting the questions and the people who are marking, not the lecturers. So it can’t be the lecturers that are not teaching well. It has to do with the marking. There is something wrong and it is not the fault of the lecturers as well, because the lecturers would teach and it appears it is not the lecturers that are marking,” he added.
In 2018, students of the school took a series of actions in protest of the Bar examination results which were also poor.
More than 80% of students who wrote the examination in May 2017 failed, as only 91 out of the over 500 candidates passed.
