The 2023 SILE Part B course was met with much discontent and little was done to improve things.

The examinations commenced on 5 December 2023 and candidates experienced the following:-

1. No reading time. Candidates are only inadequately given 2 hours to attempt the written papers, which is clearly not enough given the amount of content that is tested.
2. No pre-emption as to the weightage of topics, not even on the instruction sheets. This rendered candidates unable to strategise properly before the start of examinations, especially in the absence of reading time.
3. Arbitrary mark allocation. For example, some questions that require long responses may only be worth 6 marks, whereas some questions barely requiring a paragraph as the answer may be worth 12 marks.
4. Combination of big topics in a single exam that used to be entire subjects on their own, such as Criminal Litigation and Family Law in PCP paper 1. The content required to be revised for these topics for a single paper is essentially double of what candidates used to have to study in previous years. 

We sincerely hope that SILE can institute a de minimis threshold in marking the bar examinations, especially in a year where there was a massive overhaul in the syllabus. As long as the basic understanding and competencies can be sensed from exam scripts, candidates should be marked as "passed" instead of having to meet the unnecessary and unreasonably high bar that seems to be expected from them. If the illogical mark allocation system that is currently in place is used, it may unfairly prejudice candidates that happen to miss out on certain topics out of the humungous load of content. Further, not all of us are going to practice in the same areas we are tested on.