CLAT To Be Conducted In The Offline Mode From 2019

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) will be conducted back in the offline mode from 2019, owing to the technical difficulties faced with the online version. This decision was taken at the fourth meeting of the Consortium of National Law Universities, headed by Professor Faizan Mustafa, vice chancellor of Nalsar, Hyderabad.

A press release from Nalsar states that there were a number of technical glitches faced with the online mode, which is why they decided to switch back to the pen and paper. “It was also decided that as and when the number of candidates taking up CLAT drastically increases or when admission to law colleges in the entire country would be based only on the CLAT score, the feasibility of online test will be reconsidered,” said the press release.

The consortium also decided that the post-graduate CLAT would have a subject portion besides the multiple choice questions for admission to the LLM course from next year. The details of the subjective portion are to be finalised by the CLAT executive committee. A statement from the press release said, “In addition to NLUs, CLAT will be conducted in other centres/cities as well depending on the number of candidates. The decision in this respect too would be taken by the CLAT convenor and executive committee.”

Additionally, the consortium also resolved to create a question bank with contributions from NLU experts and other institutions, to improve the quality of the CLAT question paper. A workshop will also be held in collaboration with the National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and the University Grants Commission on evolving the objective parameters for accreditation of NLUs by NAAC and other agencies.