With registration commencing today, Guyanese law students say that they are being subjected to emotional torture as they are yet to be told whether they have been accepted into the Hugh Wooding Law School (HWLS) in Trinidad and Tobago.
According to students their attempts to sort out the situation have become even more painful as they are getting conflicting information from officials of the St Augustine Campus of the University of the West Indies with regards to their placement. There are two categories of Guyanese students; the first being the 25 who automatically gain places at HWLS and the second relates to students who would have written an entrance exam.
Students in both categories have told this newspaper that they are yet to be contacted with regards to their placements and are worried that the three- day registration period would end and they will still be in the dark. This uncertainty persists even though the APNU+AFC government through the Minister of Legal Affairs Basil Williams has been able to sort out an amicable agreement with the Council of Legal Education (CLE) with regards to the payment of increased tuition fees by Guyanese students.
In an interview yesterday, Williams told Stabroek News that at a meeting of the council held from September 3 – 5 in Barbados it was agreed that students going into the final year will continue with the half/half arrangement with the first half being payable at the beginning of this semester and the other in January. Williams explained that the increase will have to be paid before they obtain their legal education certificate. “In other words then, instead of being made to pay all the fees upfront they could continue to pay half/half which will entitle them to enroll into the final year and write exams but to uplift the certificate they will have to pay the increase. As you can see that was a far better situation than we were in”.
He said that for the first year student, they will have to absorb immediately the increase but they too will be able to pay half of the total fee upfront and the other half in January. “Which again is a vast improvement in the situation”, he contended.
Without prior notice Hugh Wooding earlier this year announced a more than 30% increase in its tuition fees as well as changes in its payment scheme which would require prospective and continuing students to pay 100% of their fees at the beginning of the school year. Guyanese students now have to pay $5.8 million (TT$182,028) for the two-year programme to obtain their Legal Education Certificate (LEC) from the Trinidad-based law school. They previously paid $4.2 million (TT$131,400) for the two-year programme.
As if the sudden hike in fees was not enough for the students, they have had to endure weeks of anxiety and waiting to know if they have managed to secure a place.
Femi Harris told Stabroek News yesterday that given that she had completed the LLB programme at the University of Guyana last year, she could not have been considered for placement in the automatic 25 for this year. As such she wrote an open entrance exam. She said that entrance exam was written at the Turkeyen campus in July.
From that point to now she has not been informed of her performance and is becoming worried given that registration starts today. She said that on Tuesday she called Hugh Wooding and informed the female on the other end of the line that she was a Guyanese law student who had written the entrance exam and inquired when the results were likely to be released given the fast approaching date for the commencement of registration. The female stated that the results were released “since last week” and that the successful candidates were contacted. Harris informed Stabroek News that armed with this information she contacted about 10 persons who would have also written that exam and they said they did not receive a call or email from anyone in Trinidad nor were they informed that the marking of the test scripts was complete.
Those persons she said contacted others and they too said that they had not been informed. Between 20 to 30 Guyanese students would have written the exam, she said.
Released
Harris told this newspaper that she asked the woman repeatedly if it was the results for Guyana that were released and while not answering directly, she kept repeating that the results were released and that the successful candidates were contacted.
When she called back Hugh Wooding around 5 pm, she was asked her name which she provided. She was then told that no one from Guyana had succeeded, only Trinidad nationals. Up to 6 pm when she last checked she had received no email to this effect. She also has not been informed by telephone.
In a correspondence to Harris in April, the Council’s admission board had made it clear that in order to pass candidates must attain a minimum pass mark of 50% in each of the five courses.
Stabroek News has since learnt that out of the 400 non-UWI students who wrote the entry exam to be admitted into the Norman Manley Law School in Jamaica only seven were admitted. A Jamaica Observer article published on August 30 quoted Carol Aina the school’s principal as saying that there was only space for seven. Aina stated too that only 17 managed to secure the mandatory 50% pass rate in the core subjects. The seven chosen were the top students.
Harris said that at this point it is not about whether she is successful or not but rather some sort of certainty regarding the way forward. “It is an emotional roller coaster to say the least, having to continuously deal with a high level of anxiety. The anxiety is tormenting”, an upset Harris told Stabroek News yesterday.
She said that this ordeal has her life at a standstill as she is left uncertain as to what path she should take.
Last year the exam results were released on August 31, more than a week before the start of registration. Classes for this academic year begin on September 14.
Other concerned students said that they are in the dark as to what will happen when this registration period elapses. More so they are uncertain as to when they will receive an official word from the law school.
Disappointed
Meanwhile, another student who wished to remain anonymous has also registered her disappointment with the present situation.
She had successfully completed her UG studies at the end of the last academic year with a strong GPA and was confident of a place in the automatic 25 but decide to write the entrance exam as a backup plan.
According to the student, Hugh Wooding indicated on their website that the ambit of the exam had changed this year, and upon reviewing the exam manual online she noticed that there were more areas of study than she had previously learned of.
“However 30 extra minutes were allotted to the usual three hours. Sample questions were also provided in the said manual, with a disclaimer of course, to the effect that they are not to be taken as representative of the questions to come”, she said.
According to the student, in her view, passing every area is an unrealistic expectation when the scope of assessment is omitted from the manual. “A manual, in my respectful opinion, should be more detailed if its aim is to assist the reader. And what good are sample questions if they do not reflect in some shape or form the actual exam question?”, she stressed before adding that she and her fellow students, putting the torture of the exam aside are being subjected to an unduly long waiting period for results.
“As I speak the wait continues. There has been no formal word of anything. However I’ve learnt from two persons who contacted the school via telephone that the law school has very curtly indicated that the successful candidates have already been contacted”, she said. The student told Stabroek News that this is unlike last year where both successful and unsuccessful candidates were spared of this anxiety, having received feedback in ample time for registration.
“I am deeply disappointed in this wanton display of insensitivity and unprofessionalism and I do hope the exam is reviewed and all the pertinent issues are addressed in time for the next”, she noted.
“Luckily for me, I am in the top 25. But once again I am met with another pool of uncertainty and anxiety to waddle through as it relates to registration and admission, a situation which visits the 25 annually!” the student said.
It was noted that the automatic 25 will be registering late, resulting in orientation, which is crucial, being missed. Additionally there is the possibility of having to pay a late fee, she said before informing Stabroek News that the class rep wrote requesting a waiver of the late fee, and permission to attend the orientation but there was no response. “After being forced to call, a representative at the school affirmed the emails were received and we told him we cannot attend the orientation until we are registered. There was no word of the waiver of late fees”.
Clearly upset as what is happening the student said “this custom of feet dragging has got to stop. I humbly request that they show some regard for our interests by dealing with these matters with more expediency. I feel as though I am at their door step begging for a favour or a handout. I’m certain that with every repetition of this situation the founding fathers of CARICOM turn in their graves! It’s a slap in the face of Caribbean integration”.
Situation inherited
Williams told Stabroek News that when he took over his present office he found no files pertaining to the Council of Legal Education. As such he said the just concluded meeting was important to him as he felt it would have enabled him to understand what the issues are and how the council runs. “That basically would have been a fact-finding mission for me”, he said before adding that Guyana is a founding member of the CLE.
Williams noted that in 2002 the former government stopped paying any contributions to the economic cost for the students attending Hugh Wooding. “That means that from that time up to the time that we came into office anyone who wanted to study law knew that they had to have the money and couldn’t look to the government for any help…”, he said, adding that when the present government took up office it was discovered that there was no automatic entry for UG students to Hugh Wooding and as a result the intervention of the Caricom heads of government had to be sought. He made it clear that it was never disclosed by the previous government “that you need to negotiate again the question of the automatic entry of the 25 Guyanese students to the law students. So we had to make that happen which we were able to do when we asked the president and the foreign minister to intervene in the matter”.
Williams told Stabroek News that the issue of the automatic entry is tied up with the question of the collaborative agreement between UG, UWI and the Council of Legal Education. A new draft with proposals was presented at the last council meeting and will be addressed at the next meeting of the executive council.
Told that students are saying that they have not been given any information about their admission status, Williams said that he was told that nothing could be done about the UG students because they had not received the pass list and when he made contact with the head of the law department, Sheldon Mc Donald, he was informed that the external markers had not completed their work and this was the reason for the delay in a list being sent to Trinidad. The list that Williams was referring to pertains to the automatic 25.
According to Williams, he asked Mc Donald to get a list to Trinidad even if it’s a first marker list because there are not usually many changes made.
He said that he had since been told that only the students successful at the entrance exam were notified; the ones who failed are not informed. Williams said that he is making efforts to contact the registrar in this regard before adding that the automatic 25 have to be notified by UWI.
Asked about the lateness of the process, Williams stressed this is something he came into office and met. “In fact the government of Guyana has not been contributing to the expenses of the school since 2000…We have inherited a situation where there is one huge debt, we have to be covering priorities. Your priorities included engineers, we need scientists we need a lot of technicians to develop the country”, he said.
Williams noted that there are a lot of lawyers in Barbados and other Caribbean countries who are unable to find work. “There is a glut of lawyers”, he said before adding that countries have signalled their interest in opening their own law school while others have expanded their campuses to accommodate more law students. “The question of priorities …the lawyers are not high up on our priorities because there are a lot lawyers, a lot of lawyers can’t get work…equally our priority, we have to go on infrastructural development, we have to get engineers”, he said before stressing that since 2002 Guyanese students knew that they had to pay their fees adding that the government as it stands now is unable to assistant them financially because billions of dollars in debt has been inherited.
Williams stressed that the government of the day has done all it can to represent and assist the law students.
