Practical Dhivehi

[Florene Pothoven]

Beginningin 2004, the Maldives has been undergoing a massive legal and justice sector reform process. Since then, every subsequent government has presented and implemented various reform actions targeting both sectors.

Preparations for the first exam therefore began as early as 2019, when the Bar Council sought assistance from international partners and bar associations. The Bar Council conducted extensive studies the following year to understand the standards and transparent criteria for assessing minimum competence to practice law in the Maldives. The primary purpose was to address fundamental issues involved in establishing a bar examination as an entry criterion for lawyer licensing in the Maldives. The assessments included a review of all existing literature on the subject in the Maldives, including legislation. A series of extensive interviews were also held with stakeholders, including members of the legal profession, judiciary, academia, law students, and legal service seekers, to explore the nature of the bar exam standards to be introduced and the most effective, fair, and transparent methods of assessing legal practice competence in relation to the proposed bar examination standards. Among other things, the Bar Council also investigated relevant factors in the licensing system before and after June 2019 and those in the current legal education system and their significance in relation to pre-admission training.

The Bar Council identified that any exam design must integrate domains of legal knowledge with legal practice skills. Critical issues to consider with this in mind were (1) the context within which the exam was being formulated and implemented; (2) standardization of exam requirements with prior learning; (3) exam language and how language shapes legal education and the legal profession in the Maldives; and (4) a definition of legal competence. The first exams also had to factor in various issues such as the relevance of legal education to legal practice, the need for legal education reform in the Maldives, and the importance of exam fairness.

Given these findings, the Bar Council decided that the Maldives bar exam will be a graduate entry, practice-readiness assessment for the legal profession. It was further decided that the first exams will be multiple-choice examinations and will not include an essay component, nor a performance test to assess standard lawyering tasks or core practice skills. These decisions were particularly necessary for the Maldives because law graduates awaiting the bar exam were not previously required to complete particular legal education or training components that would facilitate and support their licensing at the end of the law degree programs.

The legal profession in the Maldives collectively faced multiple challenges, which were attributed to the inadequate quality of domestic legal education and infrastructure, lack of relevant skills training to meet the demands of the profession and the modern world, and a lack of both entry-point assessments in licensing and continuous professional development mechanisms. Hence, among many other objectives, the LPA 2019 aimed to set standards of proficiency; establish a professional, highly competent bar; ensure high-quality legal service; increase public confidence in the legal profession; and have internationally recognized and transferrable skills. By raising the quality of the bar through an entry-point assessment, the Bar Council hoped to partly solve these problems.

The exam is divided into morning and afternoon sessions of two hours each, with 60 multiple-choice questions (MCQs) per session. The exam is dual-language, with English being the main language of instruction and questions (85% English, 15% Dhivehi). The MCQs for the exam were developed by Maldivian lawyers, edited by Kaplan, and reviewed for content by subject matter experts from the Maldives. The secretariat of the Bar Council of the Maldives and local lawyers received numerous trainings on exam development and implementation during the exam development period.

Skills testing based on ideal standards was also not practical for the first exam, simply because existing law programs did not have the infrastructure for instruction in this area. The existing law curricula in the Maldives are extremely bulky, and the knowledge overload makes additional practical components impossible. A few practice modules have been introduced; however, they are inadequate and varied.6 To add to this challenge, no professional legal training courses exist in the Maldives. Therefore, law students do not obtain sufficient lawyering skills through their law degrees, or afterwards, and this reality presented an additional challenge when setting standards for the initial bar exam.

Passing scores on the exam were determined after the exam and were not based on the average score of the exam. Passing scores for BE2022 were based on competency standards, level of difficulty of the items, performance on the items, and competency the candidates achieved.

Data collected through the above two standard setting exercises were then analyzed, and the suggested passing scores with recommendations were reviewed by the Assessment Board, which made the final decision on the BE2022 passing score.

The average score of the cohort was 66%, with the lowest 23.33% and the highest 88.33%. The result shows that the exam was at an appropriate level and served to distinguish well between candidates. The alpha coefficient (measure: 0.89), which measures the reliability of the exam, and the standard error of measurement (measure: 3.9%), which measures exam precision, were deemed to be very good results for a first delivery of a new high-stakes licensing exam and met international best practice quality standards.7

While 71% of the examinee cohort had graduated from local law schools, it is also observed that 67% of the highest performers (12 out of 18 candidates) studied at institutions in the Maldives, and a significant percentage of the highest-performing cohort were graduates of the Maldives National University.

Of the 117 candidates who passed the exam, 36 had completed the one-year LTP, 33 were undergoing the training, and 48 were yet to begin. Of the 56 candidates who failed the exam, 11 had already completed the LTP, 5 were undergoing the training, and 40 were yet to start. These data did not indicate any significant positive impact of LTP completion on the bar exam pass rates.

The 2022 bar exam was the first standardized national exam aiming to test professional competency to practice law in the Maldives. Through the implementation of BE2022, the new licensing system removed unnecessary barriers to qualification by preventing discrimination among candidates based on the graduating institute/country and/or system of legal studies (sharia/common law/civil etc.), introduced a minimum standard of knowledge and skills for new licensees, and set the minimum benchmark for admission to practice in the Maldives.

The development of the first exam however, faced immense challenges on all fronts: limited sensitization on the objectives of the bar exam among the members of the legal profession and aspiring lawyers, lack of a provided transition period in the LPA 2019, legislative amendments to seek changes to the LPA 2019, court cases regarding the development of the exam, lack of executive support, human/financial resources at the Bar Council, and the lack of operational capacity to conduct large-scale exams, not having local expertise to develop gateway exams, MCQs to the required standard, and lawyers available to work on the subject areas in terms of developing reading lists, exam items, and to act as writers or reviewers. While contribution of the industry has been noteworthy, support to develop exam items must be doubled for future exams. There are additional operational and logistical challenges to implementing the exam in various locations, particularly given that the Bar Council is in its foundational stages and running with minimum staffing. Administering the exam outside of Mal also comes with unique challenges, which include different logistical arrangements and the fact that very few islands in the Maldives may be able to administer the exam with the required security standards.

The Bar Council robustly followed all key exam design stages, including syllabus development, training item writers and the bar exam committee of experts, question writing, editing, and reviewing of questions, drafting exam rules and standards, and then subsequent analysis of results for consideration by the Assessment Board. Together with the support of volunteer lawyers, the Bar Council also prepared reading lists for the six examinable areas, to assist with the preparation for the bar exam. The Bar Council also provided sample practice questions and conducted a total of 18 lectures during 2022, to provide support to examinees sitting the for BE2022. All of these are milestone achievements.

The inaugural bar exam provided various learning and capacity-building opportunities to members of the Maldives legal profession, including practicing lawyers, law teachers, and members of the secretariat. Such opportunities have extended to experiential learning opportunities and trainings on technical aspects of exam development from the most advanced licensing systems in the world, which will continue to have a positive impact for the Maldives legal profession. It has also been a tremendous opportunity in terms of data gathering in gauging the quality of law graduates and how graduates from various law schools demonstrate their knowledge and skills. This data is useful for developing future exams and licensing training supervisors; it also aids law schools in ensuring law graduates are exposed to appropriate legal training during their studies.

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