CLAT applicants continue to raise questions about revised results; Legal action being considered even as counseling begins

Even as the counseling process for the CLAT law schools is about to take place, a number of applicants remain unsatisfied with the revised results. After first declaring the results on May 31, 2014, the organizing University GNLU withheld the results citing technical errors. It was GNLU’s claim that the bar code stickers on some of the answer sheets did not match the candidate sticker..GNLU’s press release went on to state that,.Any mismatch between the barcode and the candidate sticker can cause the marks being reflected against a different roll number. In other words, if on the OMR of candidate X, by mistake the barcode sticker of candidate Y was affixed on the front page, (s)he would get score of Y candidate than his/her own..Following this, GNLU went on to manually re-check each answer sheet, with the revised results declared the past Friday. As expected, there were a number of changes in the revised rank list given the fact that there were also some errors in the answer key that needed to be rectified..At 5:00 pm on June 6, the results of 29,647 candidates were declared for the undergraduate course and 2,025 for the postgraduate course. Applicants could also access scanned copies of their answer sheets after logging in to their respective accounts..In a press release of the same day, GNLU stated that following the withholding of results,.GNLU immediately decided to conduct reconciliation of all OMR answer sheets (approx 32,000). The aim was to ensure full and complete verifiable accurate examination results.Yet, certain doubts remain. There are instances of applicants claiming that the uploaded answer sheets are, in fact, some other applicant’s answer sheets with different hand-writing, certain questions shown to be unanswered etc being cited. Another set of students has claimed that the tabulation of marks is incorrect, with a manual totaling producing a completely different result from the declared one..Although GNLU’s Director, Bimal Patel has not commented on these fresh set of problems, applicants have been advised to mail their queries and doubts to the official CLAT e-mail id (helpdesk@clat.ac.in) Although the counseling was originally set to be completed by June 9, 2014, a revised schedule is expected soon..What is particularly unfortunate about this entire episode is the fact that this year’s CLAT was unique in terms of the use of technology. Having the entire admission procedure made online, creating individual login ids, uploading scanned copies of the answer sheets (albeit following the withholding of results) – these are all steps that have been taken for the first time in the CLAT admission process. And this is not the only positive. CLAT mentor Rajneesh Singh says that this time, there has been an actual consultation process before the examination, with feedback taken from parents, students and other stakeholders..However, even this may not be enough to stop a legal challenge being made against CLAT, more specifically the lack of an independent and technically competent body being put in charge of conducting the examination. Another legal challenge that may be raised could be relating to the manner in which national law universities are “admitted” into the CLAT list of institutes; the most recent example being the “provisional admission” of DSNLU, Vishakapatnam.