Aspiring lawyers may welcome extra revision time, says SRA
Some students scheduled to sit the Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) next month will have to wait for two-and-a-half hours in a “quiet” room on consecutive days before starting their assessments.
The move follows Kaplan’s decision to create an afternoon sitting at certain test centres to accommodate more candidates looking to complete the oral assessments that form part of SQE2.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority’s website states candidates sitting their exams in the afternoon will be expected to report to the test centre at 12:40pm and will be required to remain in a “quiet comfortable area for approximately 2.5 hours” before they begin.
It’s worth noting that SQE2 oral assessments are conducted over two consecutive days, meaning candidates will be waiting around for a total of five hours.
This measure is presumably to prevent communication between students who took the exam in the morning and those taking it in the afternoon, and therefore, in the SRA’s words, ensuring the “security of the questions can be maintained”.
However, not everyone appears to be convinced. One student, who contacted Legal Cheek, suggested the additional wait time could potentially impact candidates’ exam performance.
During this time, students are allowed to speak to each other and read printed revision materials, but they cannot access their personal belongings, including mobile phones and other electronic devices. Snacks and drinks are provided but students are not permitted to leave the room to purchase their own.
While the SRA acknowledges that candidates, who are “randomly” assigned their exam slots at the point of booking, may find this arrangement “inconvenient”, it stresses that this approach is necessary to provide opportunities for more candidates to take SQE2.
“Some candidates may welcome the extra quiet time for revision”, the regulator adds.
The oral assessments themselves run for only two hours each day, but when factoring in additional briefings, time with assessors, and the hefty pre-exam wait, candidates sitting the exam in the afternoon will spend close to seven hours at the test centre each day, finishing at around 7:30pm. By comparison, morning candidates spend up to four-and-a-half hours at the centre each day.
These SQE2 oral assessments are run by Kaplan directly, and are not held at Pearson VUE centres.
A Kaplan spokesperson told Legal Cheek:
“This timetabling policy allows us to offer more candidates their first choice of date and location for sitting the SQE2 while protecting the security and integrity of the assessment. Information about this policy is on the website and candidates are made aware of it when they register for the exam and are required to confirm that they understand it. Candidates with the later start time have access to their study materials, and snacks and drinks are provided. Additionally, we make adjustments for candidates who need a specific early or late start to support a disability or condition.”
Let week it emerged that 175 students were mistakenly informed that they had failed SQE1. Both Kaplan and the SRA apologised for the extraordinary blunder, attributing it to a rounding error in the calculation of the final scores.