Only 2,043 graduates of the law schools established since April 2004, following adoption of the nation's legal reform, passed the bar exam for 2009, according to the Justice Ministry. This is a poor performance in view of the 2,500 to 2,900 graduates who were expected to pass the test. These law schools, which now number 74, were created to help satisfy a national demand for legal professionals who could provide high-quality services.

The schools accept people who studied law at the undergraduate level as well as those who majored in different subjects or who have job experience in nonlegal fields. Results of the bar exam indicate that the schools, especially those whose graduates performed poorly, need to make stronger efforts to provide a better education.

The first bar exam for these law school graduates was held in 2006. The ratio of successful applicants was 48 percent that year but fell to 40 percent in 2007 and 33 percent in 2008. Despite this downtrend, the number of successful applicants rose each year.

What is peculiar about this year's results is that not only did the ratio of successful applicants drop to a record low 28 percent, but the actual number of successful applicants decreased from the previous year — 22 lower than in 2008 — even though 7,392 people, or 1,131 more than for the previous year, took the exam.

The government has a plan to increase the number of successful applicants to 3,000 yearly by around 2010 under the expectation that a large number of people of various backgrounds will join the legal profession and offer better legal services. The bar exam results show that this goal is unlikely to be achieved.

Graduates of the law schools who pass the bar exam undergo one year of training at the Supreme Court's Judicial Research and Training Institute to become lawyers, judges or public prosecutors. The top court announced Sept. 1 that an unusually high 6 percent of trainees failed to pass graduation exams. It is likely that the general quality of law school students has been declining. The schools need to tackle this problem.