A compilation of answers from Quora about CLATapult
How is CLATapult as a CLAT Coaching Institute?
(I) – By Tanuj Kalia (Founder of LAWCTOPUS and author of the book Law as a Career)
“Though I am involved with CLATapult a bit (and hence might be biased towards it), I can confidently say that if you are in Kolkata and preparing for CLAT, CLATapult is the destination.
The biggest thing we’ve got for law aspirants is what they aspire to be: students and graduates of NUJS Kolkata.
Noojies (i.e what we call students and graduates from NUJS Kolkata) have prepared the modules and the mock tests and also take ALL the classes.”
Check: www.clatapult.com
(II) – By Ashutosh Shukla , Graduate (NUJS)
CLATapult is arguably the best CLAT coaching centre in Kolkata right now. I dont hold this opinion merely because the founders were my seniors in law school, but because I have actually seen the care and dedication, by which they coach the students.
CLATapult was started by students of NUJS, Kolkata to provide comprehensive, quality training for preparation of various law entrance examinations.
There are classes are taken by students of NUJS, who’ve cleared CLAT and know the ropes of prepping for a law entrance examination and acing it. In the recently declared CLAT results the top ranker from WB was a student of CLATapult.
(III) – By Saiyed Anzar Abbas (Graduate, NUJS)
CLATapult is by far the finest CLAT Preparation Institute in Kolkata.
With 25 modules, 60 CLAT Mocks, 300 50-mark exercise tests, Current Affairs Monthly Magazine, Faculty exclusively from NUJS, 300 work-sheets, no other institute comes even close to CLATapult.
11 hours of classes in a week (mind you, no other institute conducts these many hours of classes in Kolkata!) acts as the icing on the cake.
Visit www.clatapult.com and feel the magic!
Which is the best coaching institute for CLAT in Kolkata?
By Siddharth Dey, 4th Year, NUJS
I’m teaching at CLATapult for a few years, and did my coaching there before that. Below is my experience from both phases and not a sales pitch, since I do not derive any profits from you enrolling there. My classmates and I, as a student, thoroughly enjoyed the classes, the spontaneity of the faculty and fed off their enthusiasm in helping us achieve what they had done some time ago. I believe I along with the current faculty are carrying forward the same spirit in the best way possible. The results which the students from CLATapult have achieved in this short span of time speak for itself.
(Disclaimer: This answer expresses an opinion, and is not an advertisement of the brands/products herein. Please exercise your own judgement.)
I will be telling you about my experience both as a student and then as a mentor at CLATapult.
Firstly, to be very honest with you, there is no “best coaching institute”. The reasons being, a very smart student can go to a very bad institute, and still achieve good results – the coaching institute will only tell you about the final results. At the same time, a person who is quite lacking in the subjects can go to a great institute, work heard, learn lots, and come out on top.
One is clearly much better than the other. Sadly for you, since results are the main concern, both institutes will be seen equally.
However, the 10% of guidance (varying in quality) offered by these institutes is very crucial, since, very clearly, not everyone can sit at home and figure things out by themselves. So, most of us end up at a coaching institute.
Secondly, anyone who tells you “X institute is the best”, are far from accurate. It is is usually their opinion of that particular institute. It isn’t possible for one to sample all institutes, so opinions may be based on hearsay – so, read carefully. Again, some institutes will be runaway winners here because of the large front page ads put up thrice a year.
Which is why, I’ll be telling you mostly whatever I think and know to be unique about CLATapult, below.
Lastly, it goes without saying that most of them are businesses. There aren’t too many in place, and therefore the bigger ones can make you pay much, much more (some, about a lakh rupees) than what you get in return. Rest assured you’re paying for the brand, and not for the product that they’re offering.
It is no secret that entrepreneurial ventures in Kolkata tend to either lack ideas or impetus, and established ones just latch onto past records and hearsay without making any improvements. The attitude is lackadaisical, except when you’re giving them money. My small experience with some of the bigger & popular law-entrance coaching institutes at the time revealed that grim reality. Tonnes of books and worksheets count for nothing when you don’t understand any of it!
Although, it may have been because lot of people visit them without enrolling later, so they don’t put much energy into people till they sign up. That’s none of my business though, since I will not be going to someone who doesn’t seem to give a sh*t from Day 1! I don’t know what you would do.
So, most of the positive reviews you read in the newspapers might be from a student in a different city.
However, the current situation may vary from what I had experienced a few years ago. Great if it does.
Nonetheless, when I realized that I am (my parents) paying a lot of money, and spending a lot of my time, I wanted to be very sure that the guidance came from the right bunch of people.
(Pssst! Long answer ahead!)
Picking a coaching institute is tough in Kolkata is tough. There aren’t a lot of entities in Kolkata, and barring a few, most of them are hardly known and have nothing credible to show – except for a vague “great %%% success rate” or “top institute”without any real stats/ numbers to show. While a center in X locality is well-rated, the same institute in another locality is pathetic – implying an imbalance in quality faculty, while charging you the same amount of money in both places.
On the other hand, check THIS.
With regards to faculty – a junior from my school, Vineet, called me up for an opinion a few weeks back. He said that he had already been in touch with a prime CLAT coaching institute in Kolkata, right before he called me. They told him that they had people from NUJS teaching there. However, they refused to disclose the person’s name.
We don’t have to go too far to see what major, respectable institutions do about their faculty. NUJS has a page dedicated to the faculty – needs a major update though. Even CLATapult has it’s own faculty page.
So is this a case of “neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride”? Maybe.
I really don’t know why would someone go around hiding such a fact. It is quite strange. It can be one of the major reasons why a student would join one institute, and not the other. Materials can be copied, with minor changes (copyright law allows you to get away with a lot); state of the art coaching classes can be built, ground-up. The distinctive factor that remains for you to choose from is the people who help you get from high school to law school.
Funnily, Vineet could’ve ended up joining based on such a VERBAL promise (pro tip: never do it when you don’t know the person, and losses are irreversible), and pay a large 5-digit sum, only to find out that the Legal Reasoning teacher is actually a German language teacher, whose translation of the Arthashastra sold 200 copies! Sadly, the damage is done, he can’t back out, and his parents won’t spend another 5-digit sum on lawyer’s fees to claim damages for cheating – and since nothing exists on paper, I don’t think that would help anyway (maybe if every one else comes up and makes the same claim…okay, I’ll keep my law books away, now).
So, back to the track – I had made the same journey as you about 5 years ago, and in August 2012, I had hit, what I now believe was, the jackpot – an Economic Times article on a student-trio from NUJS starting their own CLAT coaching center for people like me, aiming to be in NUJS. Read the background HERE.
Something clicked, since my visit to each and every coaching center reflected the same experience. Within 10 minutes, people would start getting shifty, wanting to put my name and details on a piece of paper. Questions were dodged. Given the Sherlock Holmes that I am, I wasn’t convinced.
Despite promising most of these places that I’ll return/call, I never did.
I went to CLATapult next, and after speaking for a good 30 minutes about why I wanted to study law to why I wanted to join an NLU in particular, I went back for a demo class a few days later.
Interestingly, the person who presented the demo class later became my senior at NUJS, like many others who mentored me over the next one year. More importantly, he is now in the biggest law firm in India.
At that point however, all this was in the future, but even then I felt that I was in the right place. So, I decided to join CLATapult’s classes. In hindsight, there could’ve been no doubt where I was putting my money.
After setting myself for failure by leaving my preparation to their crash course, which I took very lightly, bombing CLAT 2013, and another round of visiting a bunch of coaching centers, I turned to CLATapult again for CLAT 2014.
A year later, I was in the general category first lists of both NUJS and NLU-D. I only wrote two entrance exams that year. Needless to say, I joined NUJS. Read my testimonial HERE. Read more on my experience as a student HERE and HERE.
This is when I transitioned into a mentor from a student.
I have been teaching at CLATapult for the past 3.5 years – from the very day I started college at NUJS.
I won’t be telling you about what do you get from each of its course, tests, the costs, etc., – those are just facts and numbers, which is all on the website or can be found out by contacting CLATapult directly.
However,
THE 5 THINGS THAT THE WEBSITE WON’T TELL YOU:
- All the mentors have aced CLAT, for one, and several other law entrance exams; and are from NUJS. The creme de la creme. I myself was AIR 7 in AILET 2014, and had made the SLS-Pune first list the year before. That’s a massive ‘E’ for ‘experience’.
- Only the best teach here. The prospective mentors go through two rigorous rounds of selections – first, tested by the existing mentors for knowledge, conceptual clarity, etc. Then they’re thrown to the wolves – a couple of demo class in front of the students. Since the ones making it past the first round are almost equally great in terms of knowledge, etc, the students end up picking the one who they feel they can communicate the best with. This is critical for your preparation to be a success.
- Since I am not an old guy in business suit, but just old enough to be your bade bhaiya, it’s much easier to communicate with me. I speak your language, and I feel your concerns – just the same things I had gone through when I was preparing for CLAT just some time back. I know exactly how much time you will take to get from A-Z. What I also also know is that I can be wrong with that estimate. Therefore, there is no real pressure of becoming a know-it-all by X month, as long as you can do that by the time you appear for the Test in May, next year. (That said, I personally have, and also advise students to take mock tests very, very seriously. Don’t attempt them if you know nothing – it’s a waste of time. Solve 20 practice questions instead.)
- Mistakes are okay. You’re expected to know nothing – you maybe neither as smart as Einstein, nor the know-it-all Nostradamus. That is exactly why you’re spending X hours in the classroom – to come and learn. Mistakes are like energy, and you can start converting them into correct answers with enough practice. So, you can make as many mistakes as you need to, and we’ll help you correct them. In fact, mistakes are great while preparing for the Test, so that you can completely cut them out later when it really matters (i.e., in the Test itself).
- I’ve spent 3.5 years in law school. My way of looking at a problem, let’s say a contract law or tort law problem, has become much more refined than it was when I was writing the CLAT, or even when I was in my first year of law school learning these subjects in detail. So, when you ask me a question or present a problem to me, you’re buying into the perspective of a top law-schooler who has solved these questions 1000 times and explored every possible angle. Naturally, this asset gives me a better perspective of where and why you can get stuck on a particular problem, or find it confusing, or why the logic behind an answer does not make any sense (maybe because it’s not based in logic AT ALL – sometimes, answers can be like that).
If you want to know about the experience of other people, you can visit the Testimonials page on the website. You may even go ahead and contact those people via Facebook in order to get a better perspective. Try this answer to see what others have said elsewhere on Quora.
I wish you good luck in the hunt!
What is the best CLAT coaching centre at Kolkata?
By Saiyed Anzar Abbas
CLATapult anyday!
CLATapult has been started and managed by some alumni of NUJS, a premier National Law University in Kolkata. The founders (5 of us) and the teachers (11 right now) have all been there and done that. They prepared for CLAT, did well and fetched ranks within top 200 in CLAT.
CLATapult has excelled in terms of the results since two years now.
Read the Interviews of the previous 2 years’ West Bengal Toppers from HERE and HERE
Go ahead, attend a few demo classes and decide for yourself if this is the right place for you. Clatapult provides the best clat coaching in Kolkata.
