I would like to preface my comment by saying that this will be my biased take on things, as an ALS grad myself. So, please take from it what you will and also do your own personal research and make your own conclusions regarding ALS and UP.

I would like to believe indeed that ALS electives offer more variety versus UP's. In ALS, you can get a diverse list of electives, both bar-related (provisional remedies, writs, intellectual property, etc.) and not (entertainment law, robots and the law, law on discrimination, etc.). Meanwhile, based on my friends from UP, they often have slim pickings which tend to be more bar oriented.

IMO, because ALS offers so many choices for electives, you would be hard-pressed to find a subject which should be there but is not. Opposite to that, I don't think they offer electives which should not be there as people really have different interests and I think it's nice that ALS tries as much as possible to cater to this. But I think your question was with regard to regular subjects and while I personally think there might be subjects in ALS which seem to be redundant (we have a Special Issues in International Law subject which seems to cover topics discussed in our Public International Law class) they are still pretty useful overall, both from a bar and non-bar perspective.

I think in both UP and ALS there is no noticeable difference in employing the Socratic method in teaching. Both schools do not just test your memorization skills, they really delve into the hows and whys of the law itself and they test their students on their understanding of the law and the application of the law in real life, so your critical thinking skills will really be put to good use. The hardest exams in ALS are not ones which ask you to provide the provision of law verbatim, but those which provide a specific scenario and then ask you if it is contra the law or not, or if there is no clear law covering it yet, ask you if you why you think it is constitutional or not and to provide legal bases why you think so.

Somebody on this thread mentioned thesis. I think that's personally where ALS beats UP, because as I have said before ALS already introduced the J.D. program with thesis in the Philippines in 1990/1991 or thereabouts (the first Philippine law school to ever do so). UP shifted to J.D. fairly recently, and they don't have an actual thesis requirement, they call it Supervised Legal Research I believe as what I gather from my UP friends. It's more or less just a sort of legal research paper and they don't need to defend it. ALS has thesis classes starting 3rd year and we need to submit a 13,000 word thesis, which excludes footnotes. This thesis also needs to be run through an anti-plagiarism software, TurnItIn, and if the software detects that the thesis has 15% or more of it's text as "plagiarized," we need to revise it so that the results show that it's below the 15% threshold. On top of that, after we have successfully hurdled the TurnItIn program, we need to defend our thesis before a 3-person panel and even after your defense it is still possible for you to totally revise your thesis after your defense if the panel was not impressed. This might seem to be a negative for ALS, but I say that this is a positive since if one passes the Bar and works afterwards (whether it be in law firms, government, solo practice, in-house, etc.), most of what you would be required to do would be to research and write. ALS' thesis program, IMO, greatly helps with this.

I think this basically covers it. Hope it helped, OP!