Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Confessions of a Bar Flunker Part 9




From whom would you learn the most valuable lessons: from the bar flunker or from the bar topnotcher?



This is the continuing confession of the most famous unknown, and towards the end, I will reveal how, why, and how I knew in advance I flunked the 2011 bar given that Supreme Court has not yet officially released the bar results. That’s for you to wait, and for the Supreme Court to investigate.
Rumors
Remember, I was isolated with no bar ops, friends, or professors to give logistical and moral support, so I didn’t get much information or rumors during the bar month. 
I heard that about 200 examinees of the 5,989 who actually took the bar dropped out after the first Sunday. After that only about 10 or so dropped out in the succeeding Sundays. Who is my source? You know, there’s always a friend who has a friend whose relative or friend works in the Judiciary and the in any large organization rumors abound. Separately, one provincial examinee’s girlfriend related to me after the bar that many of his co-examinees, especially from Mindanao dropped out. So the rumor has a ring to truth to it.
Almost immediately after the last examinations, rumors came flying around. The standard passing grade is 75 although the Supreme Court has almost always lowered this hurdle rate every year. One rumor said, only 13% obtained the passing grade of 75 and above in Taxation. There was another rumor that only 11% hurdled Taxation Law and only 10% hurdled Political Law.
Are these rumors realistic? I think they are. Remember, the Supreme Court conducted a mock bar sometime in July 2011, and Justice Abad reportedly said in a forum that no one in the set of lawyers who took it got 75 and over in Taxation – no lawyer hurdled the Taxation mock bar.  A raw score of 75 out of 100 legal milieux is hard to obtain.
Therefore, I find it realistic that only 11% to 13% of the examinees got 75 in Taxation in the 2011 bar.  Therein included are the topnotchers, obviously. Obtaining a score of 75 means that the examinee failed to correctly analyze 25 legal milieux. Is this a good or a bad sign?
But maybe 40% obtained a score of 70 and above, or 35% of the examinees obtained a score of 73. Where are the scores concentrated? I suspect that lowering the hurdle grade by a point will result in a big increase in the number of examinees who will pass.  
Of course, in the same breath, I would also find it realistic that the top ten got raw scores of 90 and above.
I hope the Supreme Court will release the distribution curve of each subject showing the histogram, the mean, mode, variance, and standard deviation.
Leakage
Just to show you how alone and isolated I was when I took the bar, I didn’t even hear about the “leakage” story until the week after the bar exams, while surfing the web. Yes, I only heard about it after the bar, in the afternoon of November 29 or two days after the last test. The first leakage was supposed to occur on the first bar Sunday itself, and even more questions were leaked on the second bar Sunday.
Can you imagine that? I was taking the most difficult examinations of the government, and the most difficult bar exams in the world, and I wasn’t even in touch with the events that occurred while I was taking it?
The Manila Times first reported in on Friday, November 25.
The Manila Times report quoted independent sources as saying that a “piece of paper with the leaked questions was left in one of the classrooms where the examinations were being held.”
“During the first Sunday (November 6), 15 leaked questions appeared in the questionnaire. Then more came out last Sunday (November 20),” said one of the informants, who refused to reveal his identity for fear that he would be fired from his job in a judicial body.
According to Supreme Court spokesman Jose Midas Marquez, the leakage was just a rumor, saying that talks about tips usually crop up during the Bar exams and that there is no basis for these.
“The alleged leakage reported in a major daily [The Manila Times] is just [a] plain rumor. Every year, loose talks on ‘Bar tips’ circulate. However, [these] remain unsubstantiated and without basis,” Marquez said in a text message.
He pointed out that “Jess Mundo,” who was cited in The Times report, probably referred to Justice Alex Gesmundo of the anti-graft court Sandiganbayan.
“Justice Gesmundo, however, is not an examiner in the 2011 Bar Exams,” the High Tribunal spokesman said.
It was learned that Gesmundo and SC Justice Roberto Abad, the chairman of this year’s Bar exams, belonged to the Fraternal Order of Utopia of the Ateneo de Manila University. 
Utopia was allegedly in competition with the Sigma Rho fraternity of the University of the Philippines, where news of the leakage first surfaced.
Scourge
Such leakages were the scourge of the previous bar examinations and this made the bar unfair for the provincial candidates who had no fraternities. One leaked question could make or break a bar candidate. In the old bar, there were only 20 major questions, and if you get a leakage in two of them, that’s a huge boost. But, the thing is, if two questions were leaked, it would be fair to speculate that the other 18 questions came along with the two.
I didn’t realize the senators, the newspapers, and bar ops teams had feasted on this issue while I was busy allocating two days of review for each bar subject.  Yes, two days per subject for me.
When the building administrator where I stayed asked me about the bar leakage, I shrugged, “Let them have their 15 leakage questions, there are still 85 more to worry about.” That’s the new reality of the new bar format.
Unless, you are angling be to a topnotcher, then 10 questions do not matter much, if you really covered all the topics in your review.
But do I believe there was such a leakage? I am inclined to believe so. After all, I have seen a question or two in the bar that I came across in my quickfire review. They were in the MCQ reviewer published by the Philippine Association of Law Schools.
Undercover
Another rumor is that while the examinees were taking the bar, The Supreme Court conducted an undercover experiment to establish control data. The Bar Committee selected 20 or so new lawyers who are currently working in different government agencies and made them take the eight exams in the first three bar Sundays but not the WritLA on the fourth Sunday. These are lawyers from the DOJ, PAO, IBP, and other agencies who recently took the bar in 2008, 2009 and 2010. They were supposedly housed in a separate building in UST. They were given special questionnaires. Theirs had 140 questions instead of the 100 given to the bar examinees, and 100 questions instead of 75 in Labor and in Taxation. Their questionnaires were shredded, only the Bar Committee kept copies.
Oh, that’s why! Now I get it. During the third Sunday, there was something weird. About three came in to the room and joined us. I was wondering why their name plates were blank and how come their faces didn’t look familiar? After three Sundays, you would have known your room mates by face.
Normally, once you obtained your bar permit from the Bar Confidante, the first thing you do was to fill-in the name plate. I rationalized that they lost their nameplates, and that they were relocated to our room after many examinees dropped out in the previous two Sundays.
Based on my personal experience, that rumor about undercover examinees also has a ring to truth to it.
I highly commend the Bar Committee for such foresight in embedding new lawyers for statistical control data.
Bar Chairman
There is another rumor that is not very common. Justice Roberto Abad has been spotted going to the University of Sto. Tomas, where he was formerly Dean of Law, on a Sunday, and a curious group of people observed that he goes there every Sunday. What does he do there? To write Supreme Court decisions? The most plausible speculation is presumably to check the WritLA performance tests. This means that in addition to the rumored octet rule, the Chairman himself, does one additional round of checking the papers. This logical because he might want to have a hands-on experience on how the first batch of examinees fared in this new bar format. And given that he is an author of books on Legal Writing, he could separate the grandiloquence from the eloquence.
This is evidence of how Justice Abad has owned this new bar format project and executed it with amazing facility.   
Valentine’s Day
On December 5, Justice Roberto Abad, the chairman of the Bar Committee, in a forum at Ateneo de Manila revealed that one question in Political, two in Labor, and one in Taxation were voided, making these bonus points. He also said that there was a high passing rate in Mercantile but low in Taxation. This is in consonance with the 11% to 13% hurdle rumor in Taxation. Justice Abad also mentioned the possibility of releasing the results around Valentine’s Day 2012.
And the latest rumor is that 34% passed the bar, probably after adjustments, with February 24 as the release date after a Supreme Court en banc on February 23. Yet, once a rumor circulates, the Supreme Court rearranges its schedules to defy the rumors. 
--- End of Part 9 ----
barflunker@gmail.com





"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 2 (intentionally not uploaded at this time)
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.

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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