(From The Baguio City Digest) The term ‘topnotcher’ generally refers to any examinee in a government licensure exam who lands in any of the Top Ten positions on a particularly tough examination year, the honor even extends to the top twenty finishers. In this sense, Baguio law schools have always produced topnotchers in the yearly Bar Examinations for law students.
But if the term were to be strictly interpreted to mean the first placer only, Baguio has never produced one until last September 1998 and made known only last April 6, 1999.
Last Tuesday, Baguio ended its ‘topnotcher drought’ when a graduate of the Baguio Colleges Foundation (BCF) College of Law made history by becoming the first-ever First Placer in the Bar Exam from Baguio City.
Twenty-eight-year-old Atty. Janet Braganza Abuel scored a spectacular 91.8 percent to lead a field of 1, 465 candidates from more than fifty law schools throughout the country.
She became only the second topnotcher ever to come from a law school outside Metro Manila since a Visayan student from Siliman University in Samar achieved the feat in 1969.
Safe now, also, is record of being only the first topnotcher from any school in Luzon outside Metro Manila.
The air was so thick in euphoria in her Alma Mater, BCF, you could cut it with a knife.
Disarming humility
The small law college with a department population of less than five hundred students broke out in spontaneous celebration as it welcomed home Abuel who paid her courtesy to Dean Honorato Y. Aquino, Associate Dean Reynaldo Agranzamendez Tuesday afternoon.
Throughout the day, judges at the Justice Hall struggled with motion after motion from BCF lawyers seeking to be momentarily excused to join the euphoria back in their Alma Mater.
They had little trouble obtaining leave of court— a number city judges were alumni of faculty members of BCF.
Throughout all the handshaking and bear hugging, one person let out the faintest noise as everyone around her fussed and carried on.
Abuel simply sat in a bench at the BCF College of Law Office, weakly returning every smile, every greeting, and answering one phone interview after another. She has had no sleep overnight— as she fretted over whether she had passed the Bar Exam or not.
Then she began to narrate to a group of fresh law graduates who had rushed over to BCF to see their topnotcher.
News spread fast
The earliest news was broken by RTC Branch 6 Judge Ruben Ayson who telephoned Agranzamendez at 2:00 a.m. Ayson’s own daughter Grace had also made it and she relayed the news to her father from Manila that a BCF graduate was the topnotcher.
Agranzamendez drove over to Atty. Roney Jone Gandeza’s house and roused him from sleep at 4:00 a.m. with the news. By 5:00 a.m. the local radio stations had caught wind of the news and began to burn the telephone wires trying to raise Abuel on the line from her Ferguson home.
Was it a dream of for real?
Told that she was topnotcher by a local radio interviewer, Abuel politely excused herself then hang up, convinced it was a prank call. She only believed it when the information was relayed by faculty, administration, and Barristers Club Officers.
Abuel herself claims she was not considered a “serious bet” to place well in the toughest government licensure exam. She called her feat a ‘triumph of the age’.
A tough act to follow
Dean Honorat Y. Aquino called Abuel’s achievement “a very tough act to follow. How can you improve on Number One?”
He challenged students and faculty to get down on brass tacks and begin working on “expanding the topnotcher field in subsequent Bar Exams.” What was important, he said was the demonstration by Abuel that “it can be done. And if it can be done once, we can try to make a habit of it.”
