The greatest bane on this generation of law aspirants is that the Common Law Admission Test, the entrance exam to the elite NLUs, is conducted on a rotational basis by these NLUs.
It has been years since reformers have tried to fix this and bring a centralised body in lines of the UPSC to conduct the exam but to no avail.
Each year, a new University takes up the baton to conduct CLAT. It does not have the expertise of conducting the exam before and, inevitably, ends up faltering on one front or the other. By the time it gains the expertise to get it done in a manner devoid of any such glitches which these hard-working 17-18 year olds deserve, it passes on the baton to a completely inexperienced one and the story of ruining the test for the thousands of students goes on.
All of these young aspirants deserve fair treatment and any inequality in the way they are made to go through the test amounts to playing with their lives.
CLAT 2018, conducted by NUALS Kochi, has turned out to be the worst of all debacles that CLAT has experienced over the years.
Read and follow THIS STORY on Lawctopus to understand the gravity of the mismanagement that were witnessed in CLAT 2018.
The idea behind a competitive exam is to be fair to each student participating in the test. Unequal treatment to students makes the entire point of conducting the test redundant. For instance, having Air-conditioned centers for some students is unfair towards those students who are made to sit in rooms without ACs. Similarly, allowing some students to use wrist watches and not allowing others to do so is not just a wrong but highly unjust, especially since CLAT is strictly a time-based exam where students strategize every second of the test.
Here are the instances of how CLAT 2018 was an absolute disaster:
Aanika Aery, who dedicated an entire year to CLAT after her 12th, has this to say:
“I faced a number of difficulties. Our hall had so many technical glitches that we wasted nearly 10 minutes in the start and we weren’t provided any extra time which students from the adjacent halls were. Also, for nearly 10-15 mins of the paper, only options were visible and the question wasn’t. I had to wait for nearly 30 seconds for each new question and the next option sometimes skipped 3 questions in one go.”
Neha Nandini, who dropped a year for CLAT after 12th says “I had to change FIVE computers and 2 rooms and I swear I didn’t touch the keyboard or press the ‘next question’ button more than twice without a break. So many minutes were wasted when the answer wasn’t getting selected. Even the question bar had to be scrolled every time as it slid up each time and the question number had to be remembered as the navigating buttons didn’t respond. And I finally answered the paper in a little less than 3 hours!”
Ashad Alim says “The electricity in our Centre i.e. Swami Vivekananda, Sonarpur went out 4 times”
Snigdha Nittala says “There was some kind of problem with the system. When we logged in the first time no questions appeared but the timer was running. We had to login again and it was 3:30 by the time we actually started the exam. The mouse didn’t work properly. Even though I clicked it several times the answers wouldn’t get selected. I literally had to slam the mouse to choose an answer which took up so much time. I had to waste a lot of time in trying to move on to the next question. The program would stop running in between and refresh on its own, several times.”
Probably the worst administered CLAT till date, the only recourse that these students have is to go to the Court. If you are a student or you know somebody who faced similar issues, you can let us know here as a comment so that we have a stronger case in hand when we file the PIL.
