SQE1 pass rate falls to record 41% low

Just passed this exam and averaged in the 420s/500.

Yes, I did put a lot of work in but I was 50 marks above passing on each flk, this is a huge margin and in reality I would have had to severely mess up to fail.

It is an unpopular opinion but if you put in the hours and are competent then there is no reason you can’t pass this exam. Just like other professions, to keep standards high, there needs to be some barrier to entry.

No one in my sponsored class failed, in fact they all passed comfortably.

If people spent as much time revising for this exam as they do moaning, perhaps they would have more success.

If anything, it should be made harder. Bring on SQE2!

Good. The process is meant to sort out the wheat from the chaff. Or at least, sort out the wheat and some of the chaff from the rest of the chaff after the woke crowd dumbed the exams down.

Do firms still sack trainees who don’t pass?

It must be s*** if all your trainees class have passed and you fail.

I wonder if being a Cilex lawyer might have helped a little!?

The legal profession can be so odiously full of itself, high off the good old days when good old chaps were held in high esteem alongside Doctors and Diplomats as being frightfully important and wise and well-to-do; when the “wheat was separated from the chaff” as one hilariously awful commentator here has said. Their sense of self-importance leads them to believe their chosen profession warrants a prohibitively difficult exam, when the reality is so very different.

I have middle-aged MC and SC friends, I’ve worked with MC and SC partners, I’m not at all sure a single one would pass this exam, and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind me saying that they’ve got to where they are not because of an ability to pass a memory test (which it absolutely is regardless of what the SRA says), but because they were given good training, because through diligence and repetition, repetition, repetition and specialisation, they became excellent. None of them would be prepared to advise on anything other than their niche, hell, there are even questions within their niche they defer to another’s authority on. Most happily admit they went into law for the salary, security and career clarity, not because they’re “honourable men and women of the law”, disciples of Dicey and Lady Justice as lawyers are so often romantised to be (a misconception most in this often conceited profession are in no rush to correct!)

What I mean to say is, this exam feels unnecessary. Its a general practitioner exam in an industry with barely any general practitioners. Sure you need a theoretical and practical basis in law, but couldnt the almost entirely theoretical undergraduate degree do this? Then the emphasis could increasingly turn to specialising and training and getting experience and becoming good at what you’re going to end up doing. Like with medicine basically; make the whole thing from undergraduate (or GDL) to qualification more coherent, align the theoretical and practical bases early, and everyone gradually sorts themselves into the grooves they want to specialise in as they go.

On the subject of “experience”, I’ve been amazed (shocked) at what counts as “qualifying work experience” under the SQE. I met my C1 competency (“Communicate clearly and effectively, orally and in writing, including”) – the submission for which was in the first term of my course – with a bunch of short emails to a client asking them to sign stuff. When I suggested a year later that I now have far better evidence of communication at an actual NQ level I was told it wasn’t necessary; I’d met that competency. What? So you make an unnecessarily difficult memory test that 41% of people pass, but then set the bar for doing actual legal work so incredibly low? And if that counts as “QWE”, how many people are qualifying from positions that are only law adjacent, where the occasional contract might have flittered across the desk? It seems bizarre.

So the bar for “work experience” seems to be lower under the SQE, but it also seems to have failed in its other goals. In the end, it’s hardly any cheaper for most people; either get sponsored, pay for a course, take the potentially expensive risk of self teaching, or suffer the 59%. It’s also hardly levelled out the industry, if anything the demographic trends have become exaggerated. And it’s been marred by teething troubles, an overall lack of clarity, and a general confusion as to what the whole point is? If you’re going to reform the entry route into the legal profession, do it properly in my opinion.

(I passed btw so this isn’t even a bitter rant, just an exasperated one)

I’m a sponsored full-time student due to sit the SQE in January. Whilst I am nervous, I know that I’m in the best position possible to pass. I also know that upon entering the profession, within two years I will be in the top 2% of earners in the UK at the grand old age of 25. It seems right that the bar to entry should be high.

However, none of that is important when one considers that the SQE has completely failed to achieve the SRA’s stated aim of increasing access to the profession. It has also completely failed to prepare solicitors adequately for life in practice. Not only am I made to memorise irrelevant topics like criminal law and Solicitors Accounts, I am also not tested on material that I will use in practice (like debt finance and M&A) until a short period tacked onto the very end of my course.

The SRA’s response to my latter point, of course, will be that the SQE is standardised to enable High Street practitioners and those who don’t obtain training contracts to qualify and move into the Big Law route. One thing I have never been able to understand – how are the SRA able to get away with peddling this nonsense? No City law firm is going to hire a paralegal who passed the SQE unless they do a TC first. It’s completely disingenuous to suggest that they will. Furthermore, it is completely disingenuous to suggest that someone needn’t pay for a law degree or conversion to pass the SQE. Without any prior legal experience you would be doomed to fail.

The SQE is enormously unpopular and producing worse outcomes than the LPC. The SRA should swallow their pride and retrace their steps.