Told they’d failed SQE1 when actually they’d passed
Students who had their training contract offers rescinded are among those hit by Kaplan’s SQE1 marking error, Legal Cheek can exclusively reveal.
Yesterday, we reported that 175 students, who were initially informed they had failed either Functioning Legal Knowledge 1 and/or Functioning Legal Knowledge 2 (the two parts of SQE1), had actually passed those assessments.
Both Kaplan and the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) apologised for the extraordinary blunder, attributing it to a rounding error in the calculation of the final scores.
But the fall-out may only just be beginning. Overnight it has emerged that some students who had their training contracts revoked last month after being told they had failed SQE1 had, in fact, passed the exam.
Now their firms are desperately trying to figure out what to do. For obvious reasons Legal Cheek isn’t naming the students or firms involved. We understand that graduate recruitment teams are busy assessing the various options.
Posting on LinkedIn, the City of London Law Society’s Training Committee urged “any employer with impacted candidates to look extremely carefully at the matter”. They continued:
“We anticipate that this will including proactive and speedy consideration of reinstatement of the employment status of impacted candidates, including those for whom employment has been terminated and/or offers/training contracts rescinded,” it said. “The committee is happy to meet any employers to discuss; we are keen to support.”