CLAT Goof Up First allotment list pulled down CLAT Convenor not aware of errors Is it time for a permanent CLAT Body

The first allotment list which had been put up on CLAT website yesterday has been pulled down by the CLAT Committee and reasons for the same remains unclear. Meanwhile, students have alleged that they have been alloted colleges against their preferences..The first allotment list which had been put up on CLAT website yesterday has been pulled down by the CLAT Committee and reasons for the same remains unclear. Meanwhile, students have alleged that they have been alloted colleges against their preferences. Most students with much higher marks have been allotted lower ranked colleges..Many CLAT aspirants have written to CLAT help desk but to no avail. Osho Donnie Ashok, a CLAT aspirant said, “Despite repeated calls and representations to NLU Jodhpur, they are not doing much.” Donnie’s CLAT rank is 427, and on a perusal of the allotment list it is clear that he is eligible to be allotted a seat at GNLU, which was his third preference in the preference list submitted. However, he has been erroneously allotted a seat at NUSRL Ranchi, which was his 10th preference. Many students with lower ranks have been allotted seats at colleges which were higher in their preference list..Diptoshree Basu, faculty for Legal Reasoning at IMS Learning Services, a popular CLAT coaching centre said, “There are serious mistakes in the allotment list published by CLAT yesterday. Several students have written to the Committee pointing out these mistakes. The Committee has taken off the list from the website but has not issued any public statement regarding the mistakes or why the list was taken down from the website. Such gross errors in a computer generated allotment list definitely cast aspersions on the credibility of the calculation of marks from the OMR sheet, which is also a computer generated process. From the feedback received from most of my students, the paper was quite easy this time (which is not to say that it was of a good quality). Given that fact, a highest score of 159/200 seems to be quite low. It is now up to the students to judge their performance individually and approach the Committee to raise their concerns.”.Justice N. N. Mathur, CLAT Convenor, speaking to Bar & Bench said, “I am not aware of all these things. Registrar is looking into it and since it is a computer generated list, there might be errors. If anyone has a complaint, we will check it manually.”.Bar & Bench also spoke to popular CLAT Mentor, Ramanuj Mukherjee. Ramanuj said, “NLU-J asserted in the Delhi High Court that they are considering the grievances raised by the students with respect to CLAT. So far they have not done anything towards that. Even if they have not considered some questions or given any grace marks they should transparently disclose their methodology”..Ramanuj further added, “Justice should not only be done, but it should be seen to be done. The lack of transparency itself is saddening, on top of that another huge administrative failure. Surprisingly, they have taken down the list, the website is not accessible, but they have not bothered to inform the students about what is going on. In this situation, one is forced to ask questions about the administrative capabilities of the CLAT Committee. This system has consistently underperformed and needs to be replaced immediately.”.This is not the first time CLAT has caused trouble for students. Last year, the system of displaying the rank-wise merit list of all the candidates who had appeared for the exam was done away with. Instead students were informed only about their 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. 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. Hence technical snags with the server crashing along with futile scores made students impatient last year..Apart from this CLAT 2011 exam had a number of questions with the correct answers underlined. As this had caused great anxiety amongst students, CLAT committee decided to award full marks for each of the underlined questions to all candidates. Also, when CLAT was conducted by NALSAR in 2009, the first paper leaked and had to be set aside. A second paper was set which consisted of questions that were copied largely from two CLAT guides i.e. Universal and Lexis Nexis..Also, as pointed out in the Writ Petition before the Delhi High Court, the absence of a uniform syllabus for the test causes great hardship to the aspiring candidates in as much as it prevents the candidates from preparing in advance for the test. Every candidate must wait for the notification/information brochure to be issued by the University conducting the CLAT in the relevant year..It’s high time that we introspect with seriousness the need for a permanent body to conduct CLAT. We cannot afford to have papers leaked, underlined answers and out of syllabus questions anymore!.Image from here.