Checking and grading the bar exams

Last September 2006, more than 6,100 examinees took the Philippine Bar exam. Last April 3, 2007, the bar exam results was published after 6 months of waiting. 1,893 examinees or 30.6% of the examinees passed the bar. The other 4,294 or about 69.4% of the bar examinees did not make the grade. Good for those who passed, better luck next time for those who failed. Life must go on.

But wait, do you know how much it cost for a bar examinee to take the bar exam? For a person who earns 20,000 pesos a month, he needs to let go 120,000 pesos of income to review for 6 months. For a province-based person, he needs to rent a place in Manila for an average of 10,000 pesos per month or a total of 60,000 pesos. Plus a budget of 10,000 per month for meals and living allowance, this means another 60,000 pesos. Include the plane fare, communication and school supplies and bar exam fee of about 20,000 pesos, a total budget of 250,000 pesos is a fair amount. All of these you spent in order to take the bar exam and get the chance to practice law.

The sleepless nights, the deep anxiety and nervousness is part of the game during review. Then comes the examination month. The examination takes four days, 8 hours a day. Examinees tackle 8 subjects averaging 3 and 1/2 hours per subject. After that, the examinees go back to their old life and wait for 6 months for the results.

Then follows the checking and grading the answer-notebooks of 6,100 plus examinees. Each examiner has more or less 5 & 1/2 month or 22 weeks to check, grade and submit the notebooks to the Bar Committee. Let us say the bar examiner will give a full 5 days of checking per week at 8 hours a day, this would mean that he has exactly 880 hours to finish reading, checking and grading the 6,100 plus notebook.

880 hours divided by 6,100 note books equals about 8.5 minutes per note book. This presumes that the examiner does not skip a day in checking and works strictly 8 hours a day, five days a week in 5 and a half month.

Checking a notebook for 8.5 minutes that took an examinee to answer 3 to 4 hours is a quite challenge. If every notebook contains answer for 30 question, this means that the examiner has to read and grade every answer at 17 seconds flat. This calculation does not include the adding the total score per notebook. You add the hand written factor of the examinees combined with the inexperience of the bar examiner in checking notebooks because they are usually non-teaching professionals hand pick by the Bar committee. The time element alone makes quality checking next to impossible.

No wonder many of those who passed the bar wondered how the got good score in a particular subject knowing that he failed to finished answering all of the questions or just gave wild answers to difficult questions. No wonder most examinees cannot believe that they get low scores on the subjects that they mastered very well and get high score for subjects they barely understood.