NLS, for its own good, should find a way out of CLAT and Consortium. After pathetic CLAT draughtsmanship for 2024 and 2025, I believe that nlud would have got better wards in Bo'29. If it persists, nlud's meteoric rise will be real. NLSAT is a way to go for real. If not, something drastic has to be done to up level, if not, at least maintain the standards of the question paper.

How? CLAT 24 had the GNLU as its conveyor. And MNLU is CLAT 25’s conveyor. NLS is left with only holding the keys to the consortium’s tijori. Why has NLS abdicated its lead role? Like OP says - time for NLS to chart its own path quickly before all its batches get washed out in mediocrity. The other NLUs can bake their own cakes.

Absolutely true! Nearly all of NLUD Bo29 didn't get top 100 CLAT ranks simply because of the pathetic quality of the CLAT 2024 paper. While AILET 2024 retained its test quality, and filtered in the cream. Now CLAT 2025 repeats the pathetic quality of its question paper this year too.

It is evident that the passing-the-parcel model of consortium leadership is at the root of this rot. A mediocre consortium is injecting its mediocrity, and sapping the best. The top guns need to get out of it's cancerous clutches before the mediocre monster devours them all.

https://2024.nationallawuniversitydelhi.in/notification/20240621031958.pdf

As a student of NLU-D’29 I can completely attest to this statement. A number of talented students who would have ordinarily gone to Banglore are being compelled to go to Delhi leading to a significant brain drain and leading to record low cut offs. It is likely to be even less this year and the saddest part is we cannot accommodate everyone given our paucity of seats vis a vis NLS so a number of good students are losing out. There is quite frankly a misallocation of NLU resources to the wrong lot of students. None of us here in Delhi hope for a decline of NLS in such a manner and we would like to keep the healthy competition that has existed between the batches of the university since a while.

Any good paper has results on a bell curve and CLAT in particular would want to test you on your speed and ability of comprehension as well as your general awareness. Now let’s say Student A is way better than Student B at all the above metrics but there are no questions on that level or challenging enough to test this particular aspect of the student. They are reduced to the same level and privy to the same silly mistakes and what not and hence have an equal chance to get in. Furthermore there is an aspect that the questions have reduced to 120 ( even less after removing wrong questions) so the questions are terrible and bad as well as there’s too little of them to meaningfully test anything. All I’m saying is this analogy between student A and B applies as a generalisation to thousands of CLAT test takers. The top 100 in JEE Mains and JEE Advanced is completely different given the relative easiness of the latter compared to former. Now imagine if JEE advanced did not exist and JEE mains was reduced to 10th standard board PCM and the number of questions were reduced considerably . A physics olympiad finalist and good student only at the tenth grade would be put at the same level and would you really say it’s the fault of the latter not to get selected. The consortium is acting in a Marxian equalising mediocrity manner

When CLAT starts asking general Dyer’s full name instead of framing intelligent questions on current affairs from the hundred thousand world events that have transpired over the year, then you know the paper has lost its way. USA LSAT, UK LNAT are engaged in research on what exactly they want to test and scientifically design, redesign their papers continuously. LSAT for example has dropped analytical questions and added more RC- with accompanying justifiable research that is in full public domain. CLAT had found its mojo back in their 2021-23 papers. Then they came crashing down last year with that horrid paper! And the saga continues this year.

So yes, top class students deserve top class papers that separates the wheat from the chaff intelligently and with an underlying methodology. Mediocre / poor quality random papers ( which reflect the quality of the setters and the setter leadership), on the other hand, do nothing to separate Arabian horses from the Indian wild asses.

What’s the point of an ntellectual, scholarly VC of NLS if they can’t lead the pack. Where is the research that says what a CLAT paper should and shouldn’t have. Where is the research that evaluates quality of CLAT papers over the years. Where is the research that correlates student outcomes with what is being tested in the disastrous papers. Where is the research that evaluates if reduction in number of questions and increase in time allotted in these papers have led to better selection outcomes. Zero. Why is there no attempt from NLS to research these? On the contrary, it’s just getting worse. NLS 29 quality is there for all to see. When they hit the market in 2029, much institutional damage will have been done.

Possible solutions for NLSIU if it wants to exit CLAT (my personal humble opinion, just putting it out for fun, nothing more):

- Go with NLSAT for both LLB and BALLB.

- Re-introduce NLAT (but in-person, this time) for BALLB.

- Following the path of increasing westernisation (1): Introduce LNAT of UK as the admissions test (but unlike Jindal, with meaningful cutoffs).

- Following the path of increasing westernisation (2): Introduce something like the old Cambridge Law Test that (as the name suggests) University of Cambridge used to conduct (before they, like Oxford, LSE, King's, UCL and Bristol) joined LNAT. Those tests actually used to be really nice, since they were fully essay writing-based. Really good filtration process. Ideal solution IMV (if you want to follow the westernisation path), NLS can conduct such a test on its own, instead of having to be part of a consortium (as it would be, if it were part of LNAT) and it could set its own test registration fees (unlike LNAT, where that likely wouldn't be possible).

NB: If the third or fourth solutions were to be adopted, exam board marks of 10th and 12th should also be taken into account (like how the UK law schools do), it's only fair. I don't think you can go the entire UK law school way of doing admissions test + board exam marks + SoP + recommendation letters (and in Oxbridge case interview), because otherwise, it would become a situation where the posh schools, whose teachers and administrators are accustomed to western systems, would disproportionately be successful in the admissions process.

NB II: Either of these four solutions would work to toughen standards, IMV. Not advocating for one over the other.

1. Honestly, I don't have a very good answer to who will correct 50000 papers. I suppose that this must be part of what an admissions pannel, probably comprised of senior and less senior faculty, must be tasked with doing. Oxford, from what I know, uses graduate students to mark LNAT essays that come to them. But 50000 is truely a lot! Perhaps narrow it down? Maybe say something like only those who have achieved 90% or above in 10th boards should apply. That should narrow things down considerably, after all, how many such people in the Indian context where good students are so often going towards science and engineering, will take a law admissions test?

However, I do have answer to uniformity. Introduce marking criteria for the essays ('analytical ability', 'language and style', 'coherency of argument', e.g.). You can see what Cambridge used to do in this document when it used to be called the Cambridge Law Assessment, rather than Cambridge Law Test (see Page 5 of marking criteria). While prima facie the criteria may seem subjective, I think if multiple people discussed systematically and came to an understanding as to what each of these qualities meant and there was some standardisation in marking, there could be some level of objectivity achieved.

https://www.undergraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/files/publications/lawaa_specification.pdf