One of my favourite jokes is about the two men who went for a job interview.

Set a test, each scored nine out of 10 and the man who was not selected complained.

‘It’s simple,’ the manager explained. ‘You each answered the first five questions correctly but on the sixth the man we’ve chosen wrote, "I don’t know the answer to this question", and you have written, "Neither do I."’

Some years ago I taught a section of a master’s degree course in criminology, and had to set a paper for the end-of-year examination.

The papers were marked initially by a staff member, who then sent them to me for a second look.

The note with them read ‘Don’t bother with Smith’s paper. It’s word for word Merton’s theory of anomie with the verbs changed’ or some such.

The miscreant was in fact a detective on the local police force. ‘What are you going to do about him?’ I asked.

‘Throw him off the course?’

‘Oh no, nothing like that, just make him redo it’ was the reply. All politics. I believe the local force sent a large number of people to the university so they could have MA after their names.

I thought of both the joke and the detective when I read of a scandal concerning trainee magistrates in Portugal this summer (The Portugal News, 18 June).

A report by the Centre for Judicial Studies found that ‘the overwhelming majority of the tests revealed many similar or even exact same answers’.

Students sitting next to each other were found to have the same answers; complicated questions were answered easily while simple ones all had the same elementary errors.

As a result the exams were declared void, and all 137 entrants - cheating or not - were given a 50% pass mark, which curiously was deemed to be sufficient punishment.

Apparently there was not enough time to reset the exams.

The president of the Portuguese Law Society was not pleased.

He believed that the cheating students should have been thrown out. ‘They used fraudulent means to become magistrates and will most certainly not be honest ones,’ said Antonio Marinho Pinto.

‘When you begin as a fraud, you can only expect the worst in the future.’

It all makes our judicial appointments system look sparkling.

If only the Portuguese system had been in operation in England back in the 1960s, I might not have failed the final quite so often.

James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor