The SRC had earlier called for the school’s Independent Examinations Board, which conducted the exams and was responsible for the marking of the scripts, to be scrapped, describing it as a threat to legal education in Ghana, after only 91 of the over 500 students passed the exams.

[contextly_sidebar id=”wQsYd8tCWSjZGtQrKpUp4N342ODY1uVc”]Speaking on Eyewitness News, the President of the school’s SRC, Sammy Gyamfi, said the results did not accurately reflect the performance of the students who sat for the exams.

He stated that in order to ensure the integrity of the exams and the results which were released, the scripts have to be re-marked by “a credible and independent body.”

“Clearly this is a sad day for professional legal education for Ghana. The published results are very dispiriting and discouraging, very disappointing and clearly unacceptable. The results as we have now don’t reflect the true performance of the students. We can’t vouch for the integrity of these results, the integrity of the results is questionable,” he said.

“We believe that systems must be put in place to ensure that independent, credible and professional examiners re-mark the scripts concerned and subject this whole process to an objective assessment whether or not the right things were done under the circumstances. There were fundamental flaws; the circumstances surrounding the whole examination; the delay in the release of the results, the marking; information available to us all point to the fact that something is fundamentally flawed with the entire process. All we are seeing now is not all there is. If we go deeper into the issues and allow independent, credible and professional examiners to remark the failed scripts, we are very confident that a lot more students will pass.”

‘Illegal and unfit’

Sammy Gyamfi reiterated the SRC’s call for the Independent Examination Body to be scrapped, stating that it does not have the mandate or competence to organize examinations in the country.

He added that the Ghana Legal Council, under which the Body operates, risks ruining the futures of the students at the school if it retains the body.

“We think that it is an amorphous and illegal body which is unfit to conduct examinations for professional legal education or any examination of any form in this country. We think they are inefficient, they are ineffective and are toying with the future of innocent students at the Ghana School of Law. It’s incumbent on the GLC, which created that body in the first place to make sure that the body is totally scrapped and that, appropriate systems are put in place to ensure that sad occurrences like this are averted in the future.”

Lectures must set their own questions

Speaking to Citi News earlier, Mr. Gyamfi had advised the school to revert to the previous system of examining students, where lecturers assessed their own students.

“Now the lecturers who teach students will set questions and mark because we have the best lecturers in Ghana, with regards to the law and the kind of courses they teach. There is no reason why lecturers should not be the once assessing the students they teach.”

“Sometimes if the person marking is the one who taught the students, it becomes really difficult evaluating the answer the student has provided in his answer booklet correctly. So it is important that they are mindful and take into consideration all these things and revert to the old system. All the best lawyers we have in the country today: Martin Amidu, Ace Ankomah, Thaddeus Sory are products of the old system,” he said.

Controversy over LI 

The development comes at a time when Parliament is debating an LI brought before it by the General Legal Council (GLC); the body that oversees the legal profession and legal education in Ghana.

The LI, if endorsed by Parliament will see the legalization of entrance examination and interview processes by the GLC for prospective law students.

The GLC insists the measures will ensure only qualified persons are admitted to produce quality lawyers in the country. However, some have suggested that the recent failure makes nonsense of the processes, and emphasizes on the need for focus to be placed on restructuring the school’s curriculum.

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By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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According to the Director of Legal Education at the School, Kwesi Prempeh, management received the results from the Independent Exam Board which supervised the process yesterday [Wednesday], and a meeting with the General Legal Council is being scheduled for Friday before they can be released to the students.

Although he could not state with certainty what had caused the delay, he suggested that it could have been “an issue with the markers.”

“We appreciate [the students’] concerns. The results are in and we are ready to have a meeting of the General Legal Council to discuss the results. It’s being supervised by the Independent Exam Board, and I’m not privy to the reason why it delayed. We got the results today, the Council has to meet, that’s the procedure. The Board of Legal Education has to meet and then the General Legal Council. We are trying to schedule the meeting for Friday,” he said in a brief interview on Eyewitness News.

His comments come on the back of agitations from the students who had expressed concerns that the results from their first semester examinations in particular, have not been released, after sitting for the papers about ten months ago.

The President of the school’s Students’ Representative Council (SRC), Sammy Gyamfi, said on Eyewitness News that the long wait for the results was causing the students “psychological and emotional trauma.”

He however stated that they have had meetings with the school’s authorities and the office of the Chief Justice in order to find a solution to the problem.

Mr. Gyamfi also called for reforms to the examination regime in order to prevent a recurrence of such a situation in the future.

“As far back as April 2017, students of the Ghana Law School wrote eight courses as part of the first semester examination. From that time till now, the results from our first semester examination have not been released to students. Again, in September 2017, we sat for our second semester examinations and five months after that, results for that examination haven’t been released to students as well. It is true that has created a sense of apprehension among students and it’s putting them under emotional stress and psychological trauma,” he said.

“The normal thing one would have expected is that, after students write the first semester examinations, results are released before they sit for the second semester examinations, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case in our situation. There indeed is a problem, but we are engaging the authorities concerned; the authorities of the Ghana School of Law who are equally worried about the developments and are making frantic efforts to remedy same.”

He added that, “We are also engaging the Office of the Chief Justice who is the Chairperson of the General Legal Council, the body responsible for the Independent Examination Board, and we are expecting drastic measures to be put in place so that in the short term our results will be released to us for the rest of our academic activities to go on as scheduled, and also in the medium term some drastic measures should be taken to reform the whole examination system so that we can have a much more effective and efficient system in place.”
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By: Edwin Kwakofi/citifmonline.com/Ghana

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“We are not against exams, but we want the right thing to be done, the modalities for the licensing should be spelt out and that the institution of state must work according to plan,” he added.

[contextly_sidebar id=”wSQnzhwydLhI7uDwAkBQCFuc0U4gtYm3″]He made the remarks in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra at the sidelines of the fifth Quadrennial Regional Delegates Conference of the Greater Accra Ghana National Association of Teachers.

The conference was on the theme, “Transforming Societies through Education under the Agenda 2030: 60 Years of Ghana’s Education System; Educating for Certification or Educating for Self-Sustaining Life Transformation”.

It could be recalled that the Ghana Education Service (GES) said all trained teachers nationwide were expected to start writing professional licensing examinations to be conducted by the Service.

The initiative according to the GES was part of the education sector’s professional development and that it applies to both trainee teachers graduating from public and private teacher training colleges.

Mr Acheampong expressed the believed that GES ‘was jumping the gun’ and that they were not against the move but the modalities for the licensing was necessary in that perspective.

“For instance i can establish a driving school and certify you to drive but until DVLA gives you the licence you cannot drive on the road. This is because Driver ad Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) has rules and modalities to follow to get a licence; so they should bring the modalities not exams”.

He stated that the National Teaching Council was mandated by law to prescribe modalities for teachers licensing, and that the Council was yet to meet and could not understand why the interest in the issue.

Mr Acheampong expressed his disagreement with the idea for schools to close at 4pm instead of 2pm, saying there was no scientific basis for the extension, because the decision was taken to favour the interest of few instead of the country as a whole.

“You are extending the duration because in Accra people cannot go and pick their children at that time forgetting that in some communities some children walked for about seven kilometres to school and walked back to farms, saying such decision must reflect the interest of all and sundry not few”.

He called for a national dialogue to discuss issues pertaining to the educational sector including the reduction of subjects in schools.

The General Secretary expressed his disagrees with the assertion that students be made to carry phones to schools since it distracted lessons and affected concentration on the part of the students.

He urged government to resource the ICT centres in the schools to make teaching possible since there were lots of students who were disadvantage in terms of access to technology.

“For now, we think there should be a portal link with educational activities, since some students would abuse the opportunity negatively by watching pornography materials and unnecessary activities instead of learning”.

On the contrary, Mr Anis Haffer, a Lecturer at the Accra College of Medical, expressed the belief that students should be given the nod to use phones in schools but should be well-structured to prevent its abuse since we were in the world of technology.

Mr Haffer, also a Consultant in Education urged teachers to be innovative in their style of teaching and never underrate the students because some could be used to teach others in the classroom.

He said it was time to move away from ‘chew and pour’ and focus more on solving problems in a realistic way, urging teachers to develop psyche of the children from the beginning to unearth their potential.

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Source: GNA

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