On May 28, 2011 at 6:00 p.m. approximately 24,000 eagerly awaited law-aspirants logged on to the website of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) with expectations to see themselves enrolled in at least one of the eleven national law schools of the country. 

However, due to heavy traffic the website turned unresponsive and the server crashed. Anxious candidates were left clueless as this was not something they had predicted. The only option left was to continue hitting ‘Refresh’ till the problem was resolved.

At around 8:30 p.m a few candidates were able to access the result page. This was where the candidates found themselves in another puzzling situation. The former system of displaying the rank-wise merit list of all the candidates who had appeared for the exam was done away with. Instead students had to enter their roll numbers and controls numbers along with a security code provided in an image. Once entered students could view a particularized result page, which displayed only their secured marks, the break-up of the marks of each section, master rank and category wise rank.

The glitch here was that even though a candidate knew his master rank and total marks they could not see how many students were tied with them at the same master rank or see if they had achieved their college preference. Thus even though if a candidate had achieved a rank of 50, he would still not be celebrating as he did not know how many more students have got the same rank.  Generally in CLAT, approximately 20 candidates are always tied with the same marks but the former list system applied the tie-breaker rules before-hand to display accurate ranking of the student.

Another technical snag reported was where the Master rank had to be displayed, an empty space appeared thus, further confusing the students. Students took a while to figure out that the space had to be highlighted so as to view the rank.

The organizing committee at West Bengal National University of Juridical Science (WBNUJS) has been deeply criticized because this was no actual result. It had just caused more confusion and chaos amongst the candidates. However this has not been the first problem with this years organizing committee. On the exam day itself candidates reported that several questions had underlined answers. The organizing committee thus had to award marks to all the candidates irrespective of whether they had attempted the question or not.

Speaking to Bar & Bench on CLAT results Rajneesh Singh, Product Manager (National) for the law course at IMS Learning Resources said. “I request all of you not to relate the pathetic performance of NUJS in conducting CLAT with the NUJS as a law school. Both are quite different. It is doing brilliant as a law school.  I can see that they tried some brilliant innovations but in doing so they missed out the most basic things".

Mr. Rashid M.A., author of Lexis Nexis’s Ultimate Guide to CLAT and CEO of www.lawexams.in speaking to Bar & Bench said, “The entire legal fraternity was looking forward to the CLAT exam this year since NUJS had introduced significant changes in the pattern and conduct of examination. Detailed syllabus was announced earlier. Forms were made available through the post office etc. But it was unfortunate that grave irregularities were reported in conducting the examination. The makers of the CLAT paper didn’t consider the time factor. The English and reasoning part was too lengthy. The answers were underlined in 'B' series booklet. More than 15 errors were noted by the students in the paper. Even in the LLM paper many errors were reported. We cannot expect these kinds of mistakes even in a class test paper. It is quite surprising that the CLAT committee had not even care to correct the errors apparent on the face of the Paper. It should not have happened in such a premier examination like CLAT. I think it is better to engage some outside agency to conduct the examination like BCI did in the Bar examination".

On May 30, 2011, the CLAT Organizing Committee Convenor, in a clarification put up on the CLAT website has stated “the CLAT office has carefully checked the question paper in all the four series and has found no error in the substance of any question. It was however found that some questions in some of the series of the UG paper had answers that were underlined. Further, some of the questions in the PG test paper had some printing errors. Those errors have been noted and a decision has been taken that no candidate would be unfairly prejudiced as a result of these mistakes. Accordingly, every candidate who wrote the exam was awarded one mark each for each of these questions where there has been underlining or a material printing error".

The Convenor has also apologized for the server outage and the inconvenience caused to the students. He said, “Lastly, we apologise
 for
 the
 serious
 inconvenience
 caused
 to
 many
 of
 you 
owing 
to overloading 
of 
the 
server 
and 
the
consequent
 down time. We
 are 
working 
round
 the 
clock 
to ensure 
that
 this 
will 
not 
happen 
in 
future. Please
 save 
us
 an 
apology 
for 
this”.

The Organizing Committee shall announce the unique rankings of all the students, where there shall be no ties and only one rank per candidate by today night at approximately 10 p.m.

The online counseling platform is expected to be activated within a week. The platform will ask students to rate their preference of the universities and based on that preference, rank and category (SC/ST etc.) students will be allotted to the specific universities.

Bar & Bench spoke to a few candidates and this is what they had to say:

Sohail Tiwari, “ I have been sitting in front of my desktop since 3 hours trying to load the results. Normally when any websites’ server crashes it displays by when it will be up again. NUJS has been extremely disappointing with its CLAT organization. I just hope this is not also how the college functions".

Prakhar Shikhawat, “I am perplexed. Even though I know my master rank I don’t know my relative performance which is the most essential detail.  Now I will have to continuously apply all sorts of permutations and combinations and keep thinking if I have made my preferred college or not until the official list comes out. It’s natural for anyone who has given the exam to behave in such a way as your entire future depends on it.”