The Law Development Centre (LDC) has tasked the Law Council to investigate suspicious first class degrees issued by some universities in Uganda. This is after receiving abnormally high numbers of students with high grades stating that during training, these clog LDC’s system due to the failure to pass numerous subjects.
The revelation was made by Annet Karungi, the Head Bar Course at the Law Development Centre, while appearing before the Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Committee on Monday, January 8, 2024, where the officials appeared to defend the 2024/25 national budget framework paper after MPs asked the Centre to explain why some students weren’t admitted to the Centre despite paying for the course.
“I think we have observed that the pattern in the last academic years is really not necessarily the best, and many of them (students) actually end up clogging the system, repeating various subjects. So it is something we have shared with the Law Council, and we are hopeful, as regulators, that they will take it up and address it at the time of regulation and accreditation of the law schools,” Karungi said.
Karungi denied the allegations that LDC declined to admit some students, saying there is no student who paid for the current academic year for the current intake of 2023/24 and wasn’t admitted, but rather, during the current intake, LDC received more than 3000 applicants, and because of the limited facilities, all these students couldn’t be taken on.
“In the process of admission, we realised that something was coming up, but I believe the Law Council will handle it. You find that applicants from certain universities, almost the entire class, are first- or upper-second-class, so we have to devise a fair method of admission, and we decided to take on 60% from each university. So what we did was, ranking from the first to 60%, we took on the top most from each university. The rest were admitted and given offer letters for the next academic year, which is really guaranteed,” Karungi added.
LDC released the final results for the 2021/22 academic year and previous academic years, registering a 44% pass rate, an 18% failure rate, and 38% of the total number directed to sit supplementary exams.
