The Law Council has finally accepted to scrap pre-entry exams at the Law Development Centre (LDC) after months or even years of turning a deaf ear to the ‘most threatening’ exams at the Centre.
Following the high failure rates by law students at LDC that had triggered suspicion that universities were releasing half-baked law graduates, the Committee on Legal Education and Training for the Law Council introduced a pre-entry exam.
Pre-entry exams were introduced in 2010 by the Committee on Legal Education and Training of the Law Council as a legal requirement for joining LDC have been a centre of debate by members of the public for quite a time now.
According to resolutions by the Law Council following a meeting, they agreed to suspend the exams for a period of two years as they look into the decision to scrap them.
“The Law Council has resolved to suspend the LDC pre-entry examinations for a period of two years effective 2019 and LDC is authorized to admit 1680 students for the Bar Course 2019/2020 in Kampala campus and 560 in Mbarara campus,” reads one of the decisions by the Law Council.
The Law Council also resolved that LDC reopens applications for the Bar Course in the year 2019/20 that had been closed on August 9, 2019 and that students not accommodated in the 2019/20 can be admitted in the year 2020/21.
According to resolutions by the Law Council, all those who passed the pre-entry exams in the previous years but had not joined LDC should be admitted in the year 2019/20
The Law Development Centre is the only institution in the country that awards Post Graduate Diplomas in law and without this qualification, a law graduate cannot be allowed to represent a litigant in court.