From whom would you learn the most valuable lessons: from the bar flunker or from the bar topnotcher?
For the first ever bar exams using the bifurcated format, a total of 6,210 examinees petitioned the Supreme Court.
How did I know? I personally saw the list when I obtained my exam permit, and I was one of those in the last few pages of the list.
How did I know? I personally saw the list when I obtained my exam permit, and I was one of those in the last few pages of the list.
However, five of the petitioners were denied and five backed out, and thus, the official number was exactly 6,200 examinees. This is not the highest on record, though; it was 6,364 in 2008.
By the way only 1,310 (20.58%, 8 out of 10) made it that year, and yet the Supreme Court already added scores to those who originally failed.
UST
On the first bar Sunday, only 5,989 examinees appeared. This means 211 backed out before the first Sunday. Rumor has it about another 200 did not come back for the second Sunday. The Supreme Court enlisted 1,636 personnel to help in the bar. The Manila Police District fielded more than 100 police officers.
The choice of the University of Santo Tomas campus is perfect. The first revolutionary change in the bar exams in its 100-year history was held for the first time in the 21.5-hectare UST campus comprising a whole block in Sampaloc, Manila.
The several separated buildings would compartmentalize any untoward incidents or stampedes. And UST’s huge open grounds are good for crowd control especially on the first day of the bar. The open grounds are also a perfect refuge in case of fire or earthquake.
Founded in 1611 by the third Archbishop of Manila, Miguel de Benavides, UST has the oldest university charter in Asia. UST has produced four Philippine Presidents, three Philippine Vice Presidents, and six Chief Justices of the Supreme Court. Its Faculty of Civil Law is the oldest law school in the Philippines. And of course, Jose Rizal partially studied medicine there.
Incidentally, 2011 is UST’s 400th year, and Rizal’s 150th birthday.
Having wisely moved the bar exam from rainy September to November, the Supreme Court avoided the floods around the area.
Rainy Sunday
The first Sunday, November 6, 2011, was dark, gloomy and rainy. While it rained all night on Saturday, surprisingly there was no flooding though the roads were in inches of water.
As usual, the network TV crews covered the opening day as early as 6 a.m. and they happened to be on my assigned entrance gate. I ducked away from the cameras for fear of being recognized. After all, I am famous, although unknown.
Unlike the previous years, and as a result of the deadly bombing in the last year’s bar, no bar operations or “bar-ops” chanting or cheering were allowed. Bar operations is a project usually by fraternities or the law school administration where lower-year law students volunteer to provide support for the reviewees. Bar ops support are not only on the exam days but actually starts as early as the bar review six months earlier which includes research materials, collating the latest jurisprudence, textbooks, arranging for lodging facilities during the exams, and moral support. These are time consuming activities and the bar ops aims help the reviewees focus on studying rather than collating information.
There were no chanting, no shouting, no banners, no streamers. Besides the downpour made revelry impossible on this gloomy morning. Later there were streamers being installed outside UST but the Supreme Court staff ordered them taken down.
Together with the exam permits, the Bar Committee issued exam guidelines and sketch maps of the buildings. We will go over some of the guidelines later on.
Only the UST gates along Espana Boulevard were open for the bar examinees, and the color-coded nameplates were assigned to specific gates. The general public who wanted to access the UST chapel and the UST hospital entered via the gates in the other streets, P. Noval, and Forbes Ave. (now Lacson Ave.). Thus, practically, the entire UST open grounds and buildings were at the control of the bar committee.
Despite the muted support of the bar ops from each school or fraternity, coupled with the drizzle that early gloomy morning, their support were still visible. Some bar ops groups have their own T-shirts, jackets, bags in uniform. They carried lunch packs, snacks items and last-minute review materials and umbrellas.
The separate and colorful herds of bar ops supporters brought down on me the reality of the isolation and separation that has surrounded my bar adventure.
I walked around the UST block towards my assigned gate 4 along Espana, under the drizzle, with no jacket, no umbrella, and no hat. Such miscalculation resulted in my gray-blue long-sleeved shirt getting wet. And when I eventually got inside my room, I was the only one that wet.
With a mere glance at the nameplate hanging from your neck and without inspection, the police ushered us into the UST grounds.
We still had to walk about half a kilometer to reach our assigned buildings. Four buildings were used for the examinations, namely, the Main Building (administration), Benavides (high school), St. Raymond (commerce), and the St. Martin de Porres (medicine) buildings.
Due to the rain, UST provided service vans to ferry the examinees to their exam buildings. We were told to queue up. When the usher saw I was the only crazy enough with no umbrella or hat, he told under a pedestrian sidewalk far from the queue. But when the vans came he forgot all about me. I finally to run to the queue despite the rain and got on a van.
The van could only go as far as the Main Building so we disembarked. Under the drizzle we had to run to the roofed pedestrian walk towards my designated building as it was still way out to the back of the Main Building.
I had a blue name tag which was assigned to the Benavides building. Just outside the building entrance, there were three to four long tables where the police searched your bags and conducted body searches. We had to deposit cellphones and gadgets. We could only claim them back at the end of the day’s exams, not even during lunch breaks.
We were allowed to bring in your bag, books, notes, and food and drinks to the exam room itself.
The rooms were fully air-conditioned, jackets were appropriate, but I only had one problem. The plastic arm-chairs were designed for cute high school students, thus uncomfortable for big adults. Personally, I couldn’t sit properly.
During the lunch break, many stretched out on the grounds eating their pack lunches while doing some last minute readings for the next subject.
There was a canteen in the Benavides building with reasonable food at reasonable prices. Although, having chicken cordon-bleu for four Sundays was getting to be monotonous. There was also a canteen in the Martin de Porres building. One could go outside of the UST campus for lunch although that would be time-wasting; in five minutes, you may able to scan your notes for topics that might come out in the exam.
Wisely, the Bar Committee did not announce in advance the exit gates in order to prevent the bar ops from noisy revelry. On the first exam day, the exit gates were the ones on Dapitan St.; on the last bar Sunday, the ones in Espana.
There was bar ops chanting on the first day at the Dapitan side, as I exited. But on the next Sundays, there were none. Maybe the Bar Committee told them to stop.
Bar Guidelines
To give flavor to the conduct of the bar for the benefit of the general public, I am summarizing herewith the guidelines.
The gates open at 5 a.m. and close at 7:30 p.m. You still have time for picture taking and to attend mass at UST’s Sto. Rosario Chapel at the end of exam.
The first bar Sunday is very heavy because three subjects are compressed into this day, Political Law and Labor Law in the morning, and Taxation in the afternoon. The second day has two heavy subjects, Civil Law and Mercantile Law. The subject of Civil Law alone could be the subject of an entire bar by itself due to its very wide coverage. The third Sunday is another heavy day with three subjects, Remedial Law and Legal Ethics in the morning, and Criminal Law in the afternoon. On the fourth Sunday are the heaviest-weighted subjects, Memorandum Writing for four hours in the morning, and Legal Opinion Writing for three hours in the afternoon.
Petition
Your quest for the bar officially starts with your petition to the Supreme Court to take the bar. Several decades ago, the bar was usually conducted in November, then it was changed to September, and for 2011, the Supreme Court reverted back to November, and changed the venue to UST for the first time.
For 2011, the deadline for the petition was August 15 but for 99.99% of the applicants this should not be a problem because the forms are given by the Review Center who usually do the filing for them. In my case, as I already told you, I had to ask the petition form from a friend and submitted it myself a few minutes before the deadline.
The Supreme Court published the list of petitioners which numbered 6,200 for the 2011 bar. Starting ??the bar exam kits were ready for distribution. This kit included the Notice of Admission (exam permit), Color-coded big nameplate, and a list of rules and guidelines which included sketch maps of UST.
Materials
The building and room assignment were written on the nameplate. For the MCQ, a No.2 pencil was required for shading the circles on the answer sheet. Instead of two pencils as advised, I brought 12 Faber-Castell pencils, a mechanical pencil sharpener with many erasers. For the WritLA exercises, I used a Stabilo Black for its nice feel to the fingers, with Pilot Hitechpoint V7 as back up. In hindsight, I should have used blue ink instead of black so that my handwriting would have stood out against the black lines of the answer sheets.
First Bell
My floor was on the – come on, do you really think I will tell you at this stage? My room was – oh, come on, not now.
Once inside the room, the proctors asked for our Notice of Admission, one of them signed it, and they pointed out to us our assigned seats. My seat number was – oh, still, not now. Like many of my roommates, I scanned my notes and prayed hard. This was the time to visit the rest room, before the first bell.
When the first bell rang 15 minutes before the start of test, we placed our bags and notes in front, keeping our bottled drinks and snacks in our chairs.
They distributed the blank answer sheets. Everybody out there were familiar with it as the form would have been shown in the Review Centers, or downloaded from the SC website. And lastly, the forms were part of the Bar Admission Kit.
Except me. Because I did not attend any review centers, and since I obtained my Bar Kit only three days before the test, I didn’t have time to scrutinize it. Instead, I used up one day to shop for personal necessities, and the remaining two days to study for three bar subjects. Give that some moments of thought; reviewing for Political Law, Labor Law, and Taxation in just 48 hours, not six months. I know, you wouldn’t believe me, but my roommate does. But that’s jumping the gun, I will tell you more later.
At any rate, they instructed us to write with a pen (not pencil) our Bar Examinee Number (BE No.), our names and signatures. So I filled in my BE number which was – come on, do you really think I’d identify myself this early?
About 10 minutes before the start, the exam booklets arrived in legal size white bond papers. They were distributed face down, and we were told to check if we had the correct page sequence. There were a few kinks. One or two had missing pages, and there was even a missing exam booklet on one occasion. Maybe they were able to trace it because we were eventually ready for the second bell.
Finally, the bar!
There was an eerie silence as we were all waiting for the second bell. The electric bells finally rang throughout the halls.
Finally, this is the bar! The synchronized rustling of papers and pencils signified the shifting of high gears towards the most difficult bar exam in the world.
As I turned the questionnaire face up and saw the first page, I had this kind of out-of-body experience. But I will tell you about it later. For the moment, let me focus on the conduct of the bar. Later on, I will tell you my personal impressions of the bar questions themselves.
I made sure I had the same “Set A” as with my answer sheet. My left and right neighbors got “Set B”.
We were told to write our seat numbers at the back of the last page as some kind of audit and control measure.
(this chapter has not been completely uplooaded bec some editing is needed on the working document; more to come about the details of the actual examination environment and procedures)
"Don't worry, my knowledge of the law hasn't decreased just because I flunked the bar."
- Bar Flunker
Table of Contents
Confessions of a Bar Flunker
Part 6 (intentionally not uploaded at this time)
Part 7 (intentionally not uploaded at this time)
Part 11 (intentionally not uploaded at this time)
Part 12
Part 13 (Epilogue; written after the official release of the results)
Note: Due to very personal details contained therein, I have withheld some chapters. Please drop by once in while to see if i have finally released the intentionally omitted parts.
Part 13 (Epilogue; written after the official release of the results)
Note: Due to very personal details contained therein, I have withheld some chapters. Please drop by once in while to see if i have finally released the intentionally omitted parts.
Update: Sometime in December 2011 (just one month after the bar and long before the official results were released on Feb 29, 2012), I sent sample chapters of these Confessions to a newspaper of national circulation for possible publication but for several reasons they did not.
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