PhiLSAT Comes Back in 2026 and the Verbal Reasoning Section Reads Like a Manila Accent Test
LEB Memorandum 2-2026 revives a national law school entrance exam whose English reasoning items have always filtered out Mindanao state university graduates first.
The Legal Education Board revived the Philippine Law School Admission Test through LEB Memorandum Order No. 2-2026, and the exam is coming back with the same verbal reasoning section that legal educators outside Metro Manila have long flagged as a language filter dressed as an aptitude test.
The Supreme Court settled the exam's legal status in a September 2019 decision affirmed with finality in 2021. The ruling struck down the requirement that applicants pass PhiLSAT to enter law school. It upheld the LEB's power to set admissions standards and allowed the exam to be administered, so long as the score is not used to exclude, qualify, or restrict admissions. The 2026 memo works inside that ceiling.
The verbal section is a language test with a law school label
Read any PhiLSAT reviewer. The verbal reasoning items borrow the shape of LSAT logical reasoning stems, reworded for local content. Long conditionals. Nested negatives. Idioms that assume you grew up reading the kind of English that gets written in Katipunan and Taft, not in Marawi or Jolo or Tandag.
Applicants who finished their AB Political Science in Bahasa Sug, Maranao or Cebuano-inflected English handle the doctrinal reading fine. They lose points on the abstract reasoning items where the trick is a shift in preposition three clauses deep.
The score then reads as a proxy for something the exam does not name. Which high school you attended. Whether your household spoke English at dinner. Whether your undergrad library had the Aspen Publishing catalog or a shelf of photocopied Bernas.
What the 2026 memo locks in
The Court said schools cannot be forced to reject applicants on the basis of a PhiLSAT score. That did not stop law schools from using the score as one input among several, and the top-tier Manila law schools have every incentive to weight it heavily. Bar passage rankings drive faculty hires, endowments and applicant flow. A high-scoring cohort is the fastest way to protect those numbers.
Ateneo, La Salle and UP sit at the top of that ranking. Their entering classes already skew toward graduates of a handful of Manila undergrad programs. Bringing PhiLSAT back gives those schools a nationally administered number to point to, without the constitutional problem of a hard cutoff.
Mindanao state universities produce hundreds of pre-law graduates every year. A handful make it into a Manila law school. Fewer finish. The bar review circuit in Recto and Katipunan is priced for someone whose parents can float a year of rent and review tuition on top of the exam fee.
Who the exam was designed for
PhiLSAT was pitched as a quality control measure when the LEB introduced it. Quality control, in practice, meant importing an admissions instrument built for a jurisdiction where English is the first language of law, commerce and family life.
The Philippines runs its statutes in English and its courtrooms in a code-switched register that leans Tagalog in Manila and Cebuano in the south. The exam does not test for that. It tests for the version of English that Manila-based universities already sort for at the undergraduate gate.
Every filter downstream compounds. Undergrad admissions. PhiLSAT score. Law school GPA cutoff for the bar. The bar exam itself, which continues to weight essay English heavily. By the time a Marawi kid clears all four, the class ahead of her has been the same class for four decades.
The 2026 memo does not fix any of that. It signs off on the pipeline and calls the pipeline reform.
