Every year, some candidates lose questions to logistics: a document left at home, a journey that took twice as long, a rule about what may be brought discovered at the door. None of those candidates lacked knowledge. They lost the paper to the morning.
This is the list. It is deliberately boring, and it should be completed in the pre-week rather than read on the day.
The three dates, and the shape of each day
The 2027 Examinations run on 5, 8 and 12 September 2027 — a Sunday, a Wednesday and a Sunday. Two sittings each day: morning and afternoon.
| Day | Date | Morning | Afternoon |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sun 5 Sept | Political and Public International Law | Commercial and Taxation Laws |
| 2 | Wed 8 Sept | Civil Law and Land Titles and Deeds | Labor Law and Social Legislation |
| 3 | Sun 12 Sept | Criminal Law | Remedial Law and Legal and Judicial Ethics, with Practical Exercises |
Read the reporting time from the examination's own instructions for your year, not from a review centre's summary or from this page. The instructions are the authority on timing, and they are published by the Supreme Court.
What to confirm in the pre-week
- Your testing centre, in writing. The exact name and address as it appears in your notice. Confirm whether you have been assigned to the centre you expected; assignments are not always where candidates assume.
- The journey, at the right time of day. Travel it once, in the pre-week, on the same weekday and at the same hour. A Sunday morning in Manila is not a Wednesday morning in Manila, and Day 2 is a Wednesday.
- The entrance. Large venues have several. Find the one examinees use.
- Where you will eat and wait. A known place, ten minutes away, beats an improvised search at 11:30.
- Who knows where you are. One person, with the day's schedule, in case of a problem.
The bag, prepared twice
Prepare it two days before, check it the night before, and leave it by the door. What goes in it depends on the instructions for your year — read them — but the categories are stable:
| Category | Notes |
|---|---|
| Identity documents | The exact documents the instructions require, originals, not photographs of them |
| The notice or admission document | Whatever the instructions say you must present |
| Nothing electronic unless expressly permitted | Check the year's rules; assume nothing |
| Water and food permitted by the rules | A four-hour sitting is an endurance event |
| A light layer | Testing venues are often very cold |
| Nothing to study | See below |
Two failures recur: bringing something the rules do not allow and being asked to surrender it at the door, and bringing nothing to drink for four hours.
What not to bring, and not to do
- No notes, no reviewer, no phone where the rules exclude them. The rules are strict and the cost is not worth the risk.
- No last-minute study in the queue. It produces no learning and reliably produces the discovery of a gap.
- No conversation about which questions will come out. Nobody knows, and the conversation only distributes anxiety.
The morning: an hour-by-hour shape
| Time (adjust to your reporting time) | Action |
|---|---|
| Two hours before | Wake. Eat the breakfast you have eaten on practice days. |
| 90 minutes before | Leave, with more margin than the rehearsal journey needed |
| 45 minutes before | Arrive. Locate the entrance, the room, and the toilet. |
| 20 minutes before | Seated. Breathe once, deliberately. Nothing to read. |
| 5 minutes before | The five-minute protocol: instructions, scan, pace, first sentence — see exam day anxiety |
The intervening hour is where the day is won or lost, and the winning move is to be early and idle.
Between the two sittings
- Eat. Properly, not a biscuit.
- Drink water and walk for ten minutes.
- Do not discuss the morning paper. Not the questions, not the answers, not the difficulty.
- Do not look anything up. Whatever you find cannot change the paper you have submitted, and it will follow you into the afternoon.
- Sit down fifteen minutes before the afternoon sitting and repeat the five-minute protocol.
The afternoon sitting is the one candidates lose to the morning's adrenaline crash. A short walk and food is the difference between fourteen minutes a question and nine.
Between the days
Days 1 and 2 are separated by three days; Days 2 and 3 by four.
- Treat the gaps as working days with a fixed shape, not as holidays and not as eighteen-hour revision marathons. The shape is in the pre-week.
- Keep the sleep window stable. The evening after a sitting is the easiest one to ruin.
- Do not review the paper you have sat. The questions are gone; the next subject is not.
The document check, twice
The single most common avoidable disaster is a document problem at the door. Two checks:
- Two days before, put every required document in the bag, then photograph the pile with your phone and put the phone away.
- The night before, check the pile against the instructions line by line — not against memory.
If a document is missing or wrong, contact the court's Bar Confidant's office immediately rather than on the morning. The instructions for the year say how; the point is to act days early, not at 7 a.m.
What to do if something goes wrong on the day
- You are late. Go anyway. A partial sitting is worth more than an abandoned one, and centres have procedures for late arrivals. Write what you can.
- The equipment fails. Stop, raise it with the proctor immediately, and follow the instructions for the year. Do not spend twenty minutes repairing the machine yourself.
- You feel unwell. Tell the proctor. There are procedures; there is no procedure for silently sitting through a paper you cannot read.
The one line to remember
The examination tests twelve minutes a question over six sittings. Everything in this article exists to make sure none of those twelve minutes is spent on a bag, a bus or a document — because those minutes are the cheapest in the whole year to protect, and the most expensive to lose.