It's the merry Bar month again!

THE bar examinations start this weekend and the whole rigmarole of sending off examinees with bands, flyers, streamers and cheers will play itself out — after a two-year respite brought about by the pandemic. It was not always like this, in saner times. My parents took the bar examination without fanfare — they rose early in the morning without waking up the rest of the household to announce that they were off to something momentous, attended Mass at Quiapo Church and then proceeded to MLQ, not yet a university at the time, where the bar examinations were held. Alas, those simpler and more sober days have passed. What our law schools have made of the bar examination is some kind of informal competition in what have been called 'bar-ops" — bar operations, which means younger law students pampering the examinees and responding to every whim and fancy in the hope of boosting the school's performance in the examination. To be sure, the bar examination is not necessarily the toughest examination there is. The foreign service examination is a needle's eye compared to the Bar, and even if medical schools post higher percentages than law schools in terms of licensure examination passers, this is explained by the very tough retention policies of medical schools. But there is no doubt that medicine is a very tough course.

Many of the lists of the toughest courses in academia place engineering and chartered accountancy way ahead of law. No law student, of course, will accept this, and much less will law deans who insist that they preside over the most demanding of disciplines. The Oxford Summer Courses website lists what it adjudges to be the hardest A-level courses. Topping the list is physics — and that should not be surprising, considering that Oxford and Cambridge have contributed to the world the most brilliant minds in physics. That should also be clear from even just a cursory reading of what Stephen Hawking meant to be "popular readings" — A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design. They do not make for easy reading at all! Second on the list is higher mathematics. In one other list, law ranks sixth, coming after engineering, chartered accountancy, medicine, pharmacy and architecture. Of course, it will always be open to debate how reliable the criteria for ranking were, but what is clear is that law is not the clear topnotcher in level of difficulty.