Feb 22, 2010 11:17 PM
By Andile Ndlovu, Sunday Times
Some of South Africa's law graduates have been so badly educated that they can barely count, operate a computer, or read and write in English.
That's what some experts said in support of an investigation by the Council on Higher Education on the effectiveness of the Bachelor of Law degree which, they say, does not prepare students for the profession's demands.
The four-year LLB degree previously took five years to complete, but 12 years ago the Department of Justice reduced it to four years to accommodate previously disadvantaged matrics, allowing them to complete the course and save a year's tuition fees.
Nic Swart from the Law Society of South Africa said the situation was "a great concern".Read more »
"There are certainly graduates who come out prepared for practice, but the greatest concern is that many have extreme difficulty in writing properly. One of our tasks is to teach students to draft legal documents, but we find that they struggle to do that in English," he said.
"We were also commissioned by the University of Cape Town to do research with their students, and we found that 70% of them couldn't calculate even simple tasks. They emerged without the ability to research legal documents or use a computer and the Internet."
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