DAVAO CITY (MindaNews / 24 September) – A cheerful crowd of families, friends, classmates, and fraternity members gathered outside the testing center of the 2023 Bar Examinations here Sunday in support of the bar-takers on the last day of their licensure examinations.
Daniel Lorenzo Operario, 26, a graduate of the Ateneo de Davao University (ADDU) College of Law, was the first to finish the bar exams, and was welcomed by his fraternity mates from Tau Mu as he left the testing center at 4:41 p.m.
He thanked his professors for helping him prepare for the bar exams, noting their batch had the shortest preparation as they started reviewing only last April.
Operario said preparing for the bar was exhausting but that he was glad that the exams were finally over.
He said he looked forward to catching up on lost sleep after reading piles of review materials for hours on end while preparing for the examinations.
“My teachers would usually say that preparation for the bar starts on the first day of your first year. This is true because there were items that were not really discussed in the review but came out during our first year,” he said.
Out of the 10,387 examinees in the Philippines, there were 945 bar candidates who took the examinations at the ADDU-Senior High School in Bangkal on the third day, with Criminal Law in the morning and Remedial Law, Legal and Judicial Ethics with Practical Exercises in the afternoon.
ADDU-SHS and Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro City were among the 14 testing centers across the country. They were the only two bar exam venues in Mindanao.
Operario said compressing the bar examinations in three days in a span of one week made it more challenging compared to the previous bar examinations that were held on the four Sundays of November.
He said the “Remedial Law was the most difficult while the Civil Law the easiest.”
Operario expressed hopes he would fare well in the exams.
This year’s bar exams, chaired by Associate Justice Ramon Hernando, were composed of six core subjects, with two subjects taken per exam date, one in the morning and another in the afternoon.
Capt. Rose Aguilar, station commander of the Talomo Police Station, said that the bar examinations were generally peaceful.
He said that security personnel were deployed as early as Saturday to ensure the safety of the bar candidates. (Antonio L. Colina IV / MindaNews)
