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I agree entirely that the Law Society Finals Part II were right in principle, (externally set, properly invigilated, anonymously marked, everybody doing the same exam at the same time throughout the country), although my experience and perception was, and still is, that the Law Society got the implementation badly wrong.

It was introduced very quickly after announcing it would happen.

The failure rate was very high to start with, leading to a spectacular shortage of applicants for training contracts, but by the end the pass rate was very high and for a much larger cohort leading to a massive over-production of applicants for the number of available training contracts.

Given that a large number were moderated through in the earlier years, (we know this because one year a person inputting the moderated marks fell asleep and people who were certain they had passed got a fail certificate), quite how the Law Society managed to mismanage the numbers is completely beyond me. All they had to do was moderate through some more in the earlier years and fewer in the later years so that, more or less, the numbers passing equaled the number of training contracts available ... but then nothing surprises me about the Law Society.