OVERHAUL ZIALE

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 13:16:59 +0000

THE perennial poor pass rate at Zambia’s only bar-admissions school, the Zambia Institute of Advanced Legal Education (ZIALE), is a matter of grave concern and calls for deliberate institutional reforms.

It is incredible that out of over 300 students who sat for the mid-year examination assessment, only seven cleared the 10 courses representing a two percent pass rate. This is unacceptable.

Failure of students is an indictment that lecturers and the institution itself have lamentably failed to perform to public expectation.

ZIALE’s pass rate does not only defy logic but much more so is statistically at variance with empirical norms of normal distribution of human intelligence levels.

There is no justification why ZIALE should perennially record lower pass rates than other highly academically demanding professional schools.

It is common knowledge that the lawyers who administer and teach at ZIALE have financial incentives to keep the profession small.

With only a few hundred private practitioners in the country, many Zambian law firms want to continue to charge exorbitant legal fees an hour, fees that equal or surpass those of lawyers in countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

This notion is highly retrogressive. It deprives majority of our citizens of legal representation and guidance in various aspects of life.

The mere fact that only a small fraction of law graduates who enroll at ZIALE will pass the course on their first attempt, with first-time takers who clear ZIALE at rates hovering between ten and twelve percent, goes to show that something is terribly wrong at the institution.

Much as Zambia‘s resource-strapped education system bears some of the responsibility for failure rates at ZIALE, institutional problems at ZIALE itself largely contribute to the high failure rates.

Foremost, although ZIALE‘s curriculum mimics that of a typical law school, with teachers lecturing on academic subjects in a classroom setting, lecturers at ZIALE tend to be legal practitioners with little or no outside experience as educators.

Clearly, the current format is intrinsically flawed. Given the academic nature of ZIALE classes, these lawyers may not be ideally suited to their roles at the institute.

And retaining a faculty composed almost entirely of practitioners, however, ZIALE has accepted a cadre of law teachers without the academic training generally required for such an enterprise.

Understandably, the original intention to organize ZIALE was to be a law practice institute as a clinical laboratory, offering students the chance to learn in a practice-oriented setting.

Unfortunately, this is not what is prevailing. The programme at ZIALE currently resembles a conventional law school curriculum which is unlike a practitioner’s office.

This problem is compounded by the club-like nature of ZIALE hiring lecturers. The mechanism used when it comes to engaging teaching staff is rather repugnant to standard recruitment processes.

Why does ZIALE not advertise positions for lecturers? Instead, its current members of staff merely go head-hunting and thereafter recommend new teachers to their peers. How can the pass rate improve?

As a consequence, teaching at ZIALE suffers. It is for this reason that the need to reconsider reform should not only be in its curriculum but also its recruitment process of teaching staff.

In the same vein, a lack of transparency in ZIALE’s grading process has for a long time undermined the integrity of the system. Despite such an alarming failure rates, students who do not clear mid-terms or final exams are not permitted to review their test papers.

If ZIALE’s grading system is truly reliable, the lecturers and assessors should have little concern about opening that system to review. What are they scared of?

Reviewing of examinations papers would not only be a highly useful learning experience that could help unsuccessful candidates understand the reasons for their failures and how to improve their performance but also greater transparency would ensure the integrity of the grading process.

We urge the Ministry of Justice and other stakeholders to conduct a thorough review in a bid to improve the pass rate at ZIALE. The need to overhaul the law practice institute cannot be overemphasized.