Students complain of glitches in law test but retest unlikely

NEWDELHI: Though students from across India complained about glitches during the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) held on Sunday, there may not be a retest.

Students from various centres in cities such as Delhi, Lucknow, Jaipur, Nagpur and Dehradun took to social media sites after Sunday’s test to complain about alleged technical glitches in the online test and consequent loss of time during the two-hour test in which students are expected to attempt 200 questions.

A change.org petition was started on Sunday, asking human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar for a retest, and it had gathered 412 signatures by Monday night.

The entrance test for admission to undergraduate and postgraduate law courses in 19 national law universities of India is conducted on rotation by one of 19 institutes every year.

This year, the National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS) in Kochi was responsible to organise CLAT. “There were some technical issues during the exam, particularly in centres in north India such as Delhi. But as per the information we have right now, no student seems to have lost time as the systems on which the students took the online tests should have compensated for any such loss of time,” said Mahadev MG, registrar of NUALS Kochi, who is also a member of the CLAT 2018 implementation committee.

He said hence they were not currently considering a retest, but also added that they had asked the service providers to send reports on the conduct of the exam. Another university official said that not many students were affected by the glitches.

“Out of the around 59,300 students who took the test, not more than 300 students encountered problems. So currently there is no plan of a retest, as it would be a hassle to conduct it again at such a scale,” he said on condition of anonymity.

Gautam Bawa, the group product head at Career Launcher, a coaching institute, who had also attempted the test at a Greater Noida centre, said that a retest would be ideal to ensure parity between students as different students allegedly got different amount of time to complete the test because of the glitches.

At an exam centre in Okhla, Delhi, students alleged that they lost up to 15 minutes.

In Lucknow, candidates such as Manjot Singh said the paper was easy but technical snags consumed a lot of time.

Shashi Tharoor, MP from Kerala also took to Twitter, to say that he was “getting serious complaints about the conduct of CLAT 2018.”