This is what failing truly looks like.
Every time results for a licensure examination are released, there is considerable attention to the stories of the passers.
The recent release of the Bar results is no exception. There were 11,420 examinees duringSeptember 2025 exam, and 5,594 – 0r 48.98 percent – were successful. This passing rate is the highest since the extraordinarily high rate of 72.28% during the pandemic years of 2020/2021. The lowest passing rate in recent years is 17.76%, registered in 2012, according to a summary by the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
The top passer was already a licensed electrical engineer who later on decided to study the law. He was a working student. He said he did not really expect to place first and in fact only learned of his feat through the call of a friend.
But one does not have to place first to merit a report.
One 59-year-old man, for example, took three decades and 11 attempts to become a lawyer. Now a father of five, he encouraged others to not give up on their dreams. Another father also passed the Bar after trying four times in 23 years. A 50-year-old woman passed on her second try and after hurdling life’s more trying tests – sicknesses, a business, and rasing four children.
Another mother, this time of three children while also being a bank employee, placed 14th in the Bar.
Yet another successful examinee is a priest and fire superintendent – a former teacher who had first dreamed of becoming a doctor. He had also failed in his previous Bar attempt.
And then there is the actor who played a lawyer in a recent movie, seemingly manifesting his eventual success. Another new lawyer is said to be the inspiration for one of the roles in the movie and musical Bar Boys. Referring to his less-than-spectacular journey in his studies, the actor said in an interview: “If I can make it, anyone can.”
Meanwhile, another examinee who made it to the Top Ten is the son of fisherfolk from Bantayan Island in Cebu. A medical technologist in a district hospital in Camarines Norte saw firsthand the need to defend workers’ rights, specifically on issues of compensation and discrimination. As a bonus, this new lawyer has been using the label “abogado” as his last name since birth.
Finally, one Bar passer passed out after learning that he had passed. His sister captured the incident, and uploaded it on social media. The video had since become viral.
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The stories mentioned above are just a small fraction of the 5,594 stories that arose out of the 2025 Bar. While these other stories may be not known, or are less dramatic, they are success stories nonetheless. They started from the students’ desire to study the law, hurdle the admission process, show up in class, spend long hours reading and memorizing laws and jurisprudence, prepare for exams, stand in class while being questioned by their professors, study for the Bar. They do all these while dealing with the other aspects of their personal life. Many may even be working, raising families, or both. Some may be battling physical or mental illnesses, or dealing with other challenges known only to them. Oh yes, we love success stories. Against-all-odds stories. Natural progression stories.
But what about the journeys that do not end in triumphs? There were 5,826 examinees this year who did not quite make it. Does it mean then that the stories are not worthy of being told? More than these exam takers, what about the hundreds or thousands more of law students who dropped out or kicked out during several stages of their education?
Again, these are not stories that we do not hear because they do not neatly fit under the “success” category. But there are likely many people who pursued other fields and succeeded nonetheless, or who picked up valuable lessons along the way, or who continued to serve in other ways sans the coveted title “Attorney.”
But here’s a kind of failure that I will not enclose in quotation marks, because it represents a real defeat: passing the Bar, taking the oath, practicing the law, advancing in the profession – and then using the knowledge of the law and squandering society’s high regard for lawyers to commit abuses, defend what is morally wrong, bend the truth, and advance injustice in the world.
I hope the new lawyers who will take their oaths next month would always remember this.
