This blog, Law School Noob, has been very vocal in its call for the Supreme Court of the Philippines to end the Top 10 madness at the conclusion of the Bar Exams, where the Court routinely releases the list of the 10 Bar passers who earned the highest scores.
A thorough discussion of why this "topnotcher" syndrome is parochial, backward, and stupid, is found in this blog post from 2020:
READ: Here's why the Supreme Court of the Philippines should do away with the Top 10 Bar passers list
So it is with a huge sigh of relief that Justice Marvic Leonen, this year's Bar Chair, has taken the moral high road and deided to axe this useless culture once and for all.
In Bar Matter No. 3860, re: Grading System for the 2020/21 Bar Examinations, the Supreme Court will no longer release a Top 10 list of the highest scorers. Instead, it will release a list of the names of Bar passers who obtained a score of 85% or higher. The names will be arranged alphabetically and the scores will not be released.
FULL TEXT: Bar Matter No. 3860
In addition, the Supreme Court will release data on the Bar performance of schools in order to determine the kind of interventions needed insofar as the study of law in the Philippines is conducted.
It appears, however, that the rationale for these reforms is anchored on compassion more than logic. The Supreme Court said there will no longer be Top 10 because:
- There is asymmetry in the time graduates of 2020 have as opposed to those who graduated from 2021, who have shorter time to review; and
- Law graduates of 2021 are coming from a very crazy period marked by the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic.
These reasonings clearly do not preclude the re-introduction of the practice of releasing the list of topnotchers.
In any event, these are certainly welcome developments. It is the hope that these reforms will spill over to other government-mandated professional exams, so that cruel and needless Top 10 lists are done away with for good.