CLAT ’15: More than 45,000 applicants, 42 cities; Questions straightforward, time-consuming

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) was held across forty-two cities yesterday. This year’s CLAT, conducted by Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow, is the first edition to be held online, and saw more than 45,000 students take the exam..The CLAT Core Committee took the decision to make the entire procedure online in order to ensure transparency, given the controversies surrounding the conduct of the previous editions..Convenor of this year’s exam and RMLNLU Vice-Chancellor, Gurdip Singh told Bar & Bench,.“Everything is going smoothly, I am monitoring the situation. There are 45,200 students giving the exam from 42 cities across India. Out of these, 39, 686 are for the Under-Graduate exam. Out of all the states, Uttar Pradesh has the most number of applicants.”.Earlier in the day, a couple of centres faced minor setbacks before the test even began. At the Mumbai centre, candidates were made to wait as there was only one person stationed to check and verify ID’s. In Noida, the candidates braved the sweltering heat as they weren’t allowed to enter the premises even 35 minutes post reporting time..Speaking to Bar & Bench, a few students who wrote the undergraduate paper said that the online process was relatively smooth, and hassle free. Reuel Davis, who wrote the UG paper in Bangalore, said that the paper itself was simple, although there were fewer principle-based questions than expected. A few students said that they found it difficult to complete the paper in the alloted time..Debajyoti Das, from CLAT Possible, said that the 2015 edition was a “surprise for everybody” and that the gamechanger could well be the maths section..Shubhi K, who wrote the PG paper, said that the paper was fairly straightforward with time hardly being an issue. The questions on constitutional law were extremely simple, and the paper contained a number of questions based on tort law. Shubhi also said that there were a number of clerical errors in the paper, with a lot of questions being directly lifted from an LL.M. guide book..There are a total of 2,164 seats up for grabs for the Under-Graduate programme at 16 National Law Universities and 568 seats for the Post-Graduate programme..If you took the CLAT paper, please do leave your feedback in the comments section.