The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2015 convenor, RMLNLU Lucknow, has added 12 new test cities since last year, has changed the university preferences system for candidates and has proposed to change the question paper pattern for LLM candidates.

The CLAT implementation committee, comprising of the registrars of all participating national law universities (NLU), in its meeting on Saturday finalised 33 Indian cities in which to conduct the CLAT 2015. Each city will have several test centres, said RMLNLU vice chancellor (VC) Gurdip Singh.

Haryana, Uttarakhand and Kashmir - which had no test centres in previous years - will now have Kurukshetra, Dehradun and Srinagar, respectively.

The convenor also added Amritsar as Punjab’s second test city in addition to already existing Patiala.

Uttar Pradesh will now have Agra, Varanasi, Allahabad and Gorakhpur in addition to Lucknow.

Instant results

In CLAT 2015, the exam results will be declared on the spot as soon as the exam is over. Each examinee will have his access to his rank and score at the test centre, immediately after the exam.

Singh told Legally India that the implementation committee has decided that this year candidates will submit their university allotment preferences after the results have been declared. This is a change from last year, when candidates submitted their university preferences at the time of submitting the form to take the exam.

Singh explained that the first list which will be issued after declaration of the result will show the ranks of all candidates and will show the universities allotted to each candidate based on his or her rank.

After this list is published candidates will be given the option to state their university preferences and subsequent lists will be published based on ranking and preferences.

Question areas headlined

LLM admission candidates may be attempting a changed CLAT question paper this year. In Saturday’s meeting it was proposed that the paper must spell out the subject areas from which a given question is asked. Until last year the question paper was a mixed bunch of questions from any area.

This proposal has been circulated for the approval of the core committee.

In previous meetings it had already been decided to do away with subjective questions in the LLM question paper, as reported by Legally India.

FAQs & Answers

Legally India commenters posted some queries related to the CLAT 2015 under our previous story, for which we sought clarification from professor Singh.

Q. CLAT 2015 has gone online. Does this mean that offline form submission has been completely done away with and it is mandatory to submit the form online?

A. Yes, the offline form submission option does not exist anymore.

Q. I do not have a State Bank of India (SBI) bank branch near me. Will I have to go looking for the next nearest one?

A. Singh told Legally India that payment from all other banks, in addition to SBI, will be accepted.

Q. I do not have access to the internet. Why’re you complicating things for me RMLNLU?

A. Prof Singh says: “Offline is more complicated. Why don’t you just go to any bank branch nearest to you and submit online?”

Q. Is there any change in the question paper pattern?

A. No change for LLB. For LLM, change as explained above in the story.

Q. Can we change a marked answer if we feel our choice is incorrect? Until last year this was a problem since we had to mark our answers with a pen on OMR sheets.

A. Yes on computer screens you can easily change your answer choice.

Q. I have a sight problem which doesn’t allow me to use a computer screen unless considerably zoomed in. Will the zoom in option work properly on CLAT test centre screens?

A. Yes this technicality has been looked into. For further assurance, do remember to take the mock tests which will be made available on the CLAT website, and check for and report any technical difficulties. Also feel free to ask the counsellors which CLAT will make available to you at the test centres before the exam.

If you have any other CLAT questions, please post them in the comments below and we’ll ask the convenors soon.

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