Reduce re-sit fees from GHC3,000 to GHC500 - Parliament orders GLC

Parliament has ordered the General Legal Council to reduce remarking fees from GHC3,000 to GHC500 each to accommodate mass failures during the 2018 law school exams.

The move is among a number of recommendations of the Constitutional Legal and Parliamentary Affairs committee which handled the petition of the law students.

Students of the Ghana School of Law in March this year petitioned the Speaker of Parliament, Professor Aaron Michael Oquaye, to set up a committee of enquiry to investigate the recent high rate of failure among students of the school.

They also wanted the committee to consider their claim that some of the questions set in examinations were outside the syllabus assigned to them by the authorities of the school.

In a directive to the General Legal Council, the Parliamentary Select Committee stated that it “is of the view that the remarking fee of GHC3, 000.00 charged by the GLC to remark one paper is high and may deny students with legitimate basis to request for remarking implores the GLC to reduce the remarking fee and consider re-opening the period for remaking to allow the candidates who wrote the 2017/2018 Examinations to exercise that right.”

According to the recent results released by the Independent Examinations Committee of the General Legal Council, out of 525 students who sat for the Law exams, only 64 passed in all the papers.

Two hundred and eighty-four students were asked to repeat and rewrite all the 10 courses of programmes they registered, while 177 others who were referred in various papers will have to resit those papers.

The examination papers were Criminal Procedure, Civil Procedure, Company and Commercial Practice, Law Practice Management, Legal Accountancy, Evidence and Interpretation, Conveyancing and Drafting.