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by Disgruntled Malaysian via email (identity disclosed to MBW)

Dear Datuk,

I would first like to congratulate you on your appointment as minister in the Prime Ministers Department. I am writing this letter with regard to the Certificate in Legal Practice (CLP) examinations for graduates of law from overseas universities. I would guess you have received a lot of complaints about this issue, so I will try to be brief.

I am currently doing the CLP for the second time. In my first try, I passed 3 out of 5 subjects. But the rule states that I have failed the CLP and I have to do all 5 subjects again. This rule is really unfair to us and should be amended. It would be more understandable to require us to take the whole exam again if we had only passed 1 subject.

Another complaint is about the transparency in the marking of the papers. We are never given any feedback on what went wrong. The appeal mechanism provided by the Legal Profession Qualifying Board also does not seem to be functioning. I was told by one employee of the board over the phone that the board does not normally entertain any requests for appeals (This was a few days after I sent my letter of appeal, upon acting on the advice of that same person).

The course is less than 10 months long, but the amount of things we have to learn is a lot. We have to study the law of tort, contract, criminal procedure, civil procedure, evidence, and five other fields within the subject of Professional Practice. Our syllabus is massive, but it is understandable. However, on numerous occasions, the person setting the questions has set questions which is not part of the syllabus. This has happened in all subjects. In Land Law, it has been a norm in the past 5 years or so to set questions wholly based on a real case. These cases are often very complicated, and would have been almost impossible to answer without prior research on textbooks and past cases. Unless we try and "spot" questions/cases. Which is anti-educational, and not easy anyway. We need more quality questions.

The majority of students work really hard to pass this exam. We have never experienced such stress while doing our degree. So it is really heartbreaking to find out that we have failed, and that we have to go through the same thing again for another year. On top of that, we waste another year of our life trying to study for this exam. It is not easy for most of us to be working and studying at the same time as it would affect our preparations for the exam. We also have goals in our lives, and our goal is to have a career in the legal field, and to earn a decent living so we can be able support ourselves and our family, either now or in the future.

Some say there is a quota which averages to about 10% to 30% a year. How is this going to help develop and improve the state of the law in our country? The quality of education provided by our local universities is not as good as, say, British universities. This can be seen in the recent Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) rankings. I base this also upon comments by senior lawyers about legal assistants who had graduated from local universities, whereby it has been said that their skill and knowledge of the law is "bad" compared to those who graduated overseas.

There has been much talk that the purpose of this exam is to limit the number of non-Bumiputras to be called to the Bar, and to improve the representation of Bumiputras in the legal fraternity. From my own observation, there are about 60% Chinese, 30% Indians, and probably only 10% or less Bumiputras in every class that I attend. There is also a perception that all CLP students are overseas graduates of wealthy background. This is also wrong. A lot of students in my college completed their degree in Malaysia. They took the external University of London LL.B course offered by some colleges in Malaysia and had never left the country. These students are not rich and most probably were not accepted into local public universities because of their race. From such observation, one could not resist to think that there has to be some sort of systematic discrimination against us. This is not fair. There are clearly plenty of great and successful legal practitioners in this country who are Bumiputras, like yourself, and many others. So there is no reason why we should be discriminated. It is also not fair to students who graduated overseas because they have spent a lot of money to study there, but now they come home to face this merciless monster that is CLP.

All I ask is:

1) that the exam be more fair to all Malaysians,

2) it should be more transparent,

3) no more quota,

4) more quality questions,

5) the questions should be within the syllabus,

5) other things that your learned self think should be changed to improve the quality, credibility, and reputation of CLP, and

6) perhaps make CLP a compulsory requirement for all students be they local or overseas graduates.

I sincerely thank you for your time. I hope there can be changes soon.

Writer's note: This letter has been amended to clarify that there is no quota to pass bumiputra students, but the fact that there is a quota regardless of race.

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