World's toughest exam

couldn't post this on Friday evening due to bloggers.com being down - then I had to be away

Julian Puvenaswaran, a Malaysiakini reader questioned the true intent of the government’s Certificate in Legal Practice (CLP).Many who had the misfortune to have to take the near-impossible-to-pass CLP exam are also questioning the ridiculous results where only 10% of candidates passed. Furthermore there is a noticeable lack of transparency in the exam process.

Puvenaswaran averred he has enormous difficulties in accepting that out of more than 1,000 students sitting for the exam, only 107 could pass. This incredulous pass rate is further worsened by the fact that the 10% pass rate this year also included those re-sitting the exam. That could well mean that, of the 107 who passed, many might have sat for the CLP exam several times.

Thus, the pass rate for first-timers could be anywhere from 6% to 10%, but more likely the lower end. Puvenaswaran asked whether one could accept that the remaining 90% of students who failed had been that stupid or unintelligent?

Star photo
Raja Singam, Principal of Brickfields Asia College (BAC)with some of 2008's CLP top scorers from the college

Coincidentally, 90% of the 1,000 over students who sit for the CLP yearly had been graduates of foreign universities. Could it be that those foreign universities, especially those in the UK, did not train their law graduates adequately and competently? What about the external LL.B degree from University of London which has served Malaysians extremely well for eons?

He drew our attention to another fact that every year, thousands of local law graduates enter the legal profession. He revealed that UiTM, as an example, has an annual output of over 1,000 law graduates, all of whom may automatically enter the legal profession, exempt from the CLP exam.

Puvenaswaran believed that the true intent of the CLP exam is nothing more than to penalise graduates of overseas universities, including those who take external law degree courses in Malaysia.

He averred that people were forced to go overseas to do their LL.B not because they just want to go to do their law degree overseas, but because they couldn’t get a place in local universities to do law due to the quota and limited number of places. Many students struggled to finance themselves, scraping for every cent to enable them to study law overseas.

Kaytee observes that the situation is not unlike the case of the Malaysian Medical Council’s (MMC) derecognition of the Crimea State Medical University after a visiting Malaysian minister made a racist comment that there were too many ‘black’ Malaysian students there.

privately-funded graduates from Brickfields Asia College (BAC)
no chance for any of them to get into UiTM

While the MMC has a right to keep an eye on medical standards of overseas teaching universities, there was a lack of transparency in the process of the de-recognition, which seemed on the surface to be triggered by the minister’s racist pronouncement.

Another inconsistency in its decision was allowing an earlier batch of Malaysian students at that university to continue their courses while disallowing later batches of mainly ‘black’ Malaysian students from studying there. If the CMSU is not good enough for Malaysian standards, then it is not good for every batch of Malaysians, not just subsequent batches of mainly 'black' students.

Related:
(1) Mediocrity beats Meritocracy
(2) University Admission Figures - One Big Lie!
(3) Good but not good enough?