•  •  Dark Mode

Your Interests & Preferences

I am a...

law firm lawyer
in-house company lawyer
litigation lawyer
law student
aspiring student
other

Website Look & Feel

 •  •  Dark Mode
Blog Layout

Save preferences

CLAT 2013: Few negative reactions despite negative marking

CLAT MCQ: Not pitiless
CLAT MCQ: Not pitiless

Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) aspirants grappled with the fear of negative marking yesterday for the first time since the inception of the national law university entrance exam in 2008.

The new rule deducting 0.25 marks for each wrongly answered question took its toll mainly on the Legal Aptitude and the Mathematics sections, as reported by many CLAT 2013 candidates who took the exam yesterday afternoon, to the Times of India and on Facebook discussion pages for the exam.

“Without legal [general knowledge], fifty reasoning questions took more time than normal,” commented one aspirant on the page. “I started with legal [aptitude] ….. And it takes 1 hour 20 minutes for completing that section,” added another.

Some other reactions:

“Legal took around 40-45 minutes, and the 3 questions of Analytical in LR also took 10-15 minutes. P.S. - It was an easy but lengthy paper.”

“Last year, a significant portion of the paper was out of syllabus, but this time they stuck to the syllabus. Only two or three questions were new.” [New Indian Express]

“right options were not provided in maths section”

“many [questions] had more than one [correct] options, n choosing most absolute made me confused a lot [and] took time...”

29,530 candidates had applied for the two-hour long test spanning 200 questions for 200 marks, for entrance into one of 14 national law universities. The paper had sections on English (40 marks), general knowledge and current affairs (50 marks), elementary mathematics (numerical ability - 20 marks), legal aptitude (50 marks) and logical reasoning (40 marks).

CLAT mentor Rajneesh Singh yesterday predicted on his Facebook page that an All India score of 157 will be the highest attained at the exam this year, and that the cut-offs will be lower than last year. CLAT 2013 results are expected by 31 May, according to the exam’s website.

Singh had criticized the conduct of CLAT 2012 last year, but was pleased “so far” with this year’s organizer HNLU Raipur’s conduct of the exam. On 26 April HNLU Raipur had allowed 1,317 candidates whose “incomplete or improperly filled” application forms were rejected by it, to reapply for the exam.

Last year on 13 May candidates emerged from the CLAT 2012 exam vowing to file public interest litigation against the convenor NLU Jodhpur for testing them on out of syllabus questions. By 24 May two writ petitions seeking to cancel and re-hold the exam had been filed at the Delhi high court and the Allahabad high court.

Click to show 6 comments
at your own risk
(alt+c)
By reading the comments you agree that they are the (often anonymous) personal views and opinions of readers, which may be biased and unreliable, and for which Legally India therefore has no liability. If you believe a comment is inappropriate, please click 'Report to LI' below the comment and we will review it as soon as practicable.