Our captions are often a little tongue in cheek. In this case it's an (admittedly bad) joke about NYC now being within touching distance of Haryana (almost).
We do have a bit of an identity crisis in that some of Legally India is half-way between a blog and a straight news site - i.e., a community/commenting platform vs. a straightforward information delivery medium.
Sometimes comments can be helpful and genuinely insightful, also in increasing transparency - i.e., if a story is inaccurate, or the information supplied by a source or law firm is incorrect. It is a nice way of getting instant feedback on whatever we write.
But the flipside is also true, which is partly why the comments are hidden. On straight news stories where you feel comments may not be relevant (or you feel that comments are usually irrelevant), they will remain hidden unless you specifically click on the big green button.
Those who are not interested in irrelevant nonsense can then just safely ignore it. But that section of readers who enjoy precisely that aspect of Legally India can click to view the comments and enjoy them.
I do feel this is a decent enough compromise, although we will do our best to crack down harder on the utter nonsense and obscenity (we have just today added a profanity filter).
1. I explained the thinking behind NLU J hits back in the comments there - again, it wasn't entirely meant to stoke the fires but rather to silence them by showcasing NLU J's performance. And in fact, if I remember rightly, the comments on the NLU J article were a lot more civil than on others.
If you do read this, please please share your information in the forum. It just takes 5 minutes and it'll save lots of students' headaches and time in the long run. Plus there'll be more fun people in the hostels next time! If you think it may be good to do so, maybe we'll do a call as a main Legally India story for people to share their PGs to raise awareness?
4. Thanks for your feedback. We will add a filter that will ban some of the most offensive expletives from the comments.
Thanks for your feedback. I accept your point but how is this one in particular a provocative headline in any way?
The headline may be showcasing a good recruitment result, which could in itself be provocative, although that is hardly our fault.
One of our aims with all this information being out in the public domain and readily available is that law students and recruiters really should be noticing that between many schools there is not much practical difference.
Of course the endless debate about which one out of a few placements are better is ridiculous, although I expect it is all at the same time somewhat tongue in cheek and some mild amusement.
Although sooner or later I hope everyone will have worn themselves out bickering and will accept that various schools can do well in different ways.
Apart from heavy-handed moderation or making our stories really really boring to where no one wants to read them anymore, please share ideas of how to make law school competition/debate take place with less vitriol.
I see your point but I think it's more complicated.
Most foreign firms would initially have a hard time in India and would presumably target only the big ticket work at which they can try to bill at rates comparable to London.
At the moment there is not a huge amount of big ticket M&A work around in India, and the big firms in India do have that market sewn up fairly well.
So a foreign firm that entered in the short term would likely build a very lean team that could get try and pick up the top work and do it profitably by charging billing rates closer to London or the US, so the local partners could integrate into existing locksteps.
Firms such as Talwar Thakore or Platinum close to UK firms clearly follow such a strategy. Those firms are not the largest recruiters at the moment.
Something similar happened in the London market, for example, when US firms came in. Unless they merged with a local player, most US firms did not take more than a handful of graduates to start with. They built lean outfits to support their overseas office. They did pay very large pay packages, which forced the rest of the market to up their rates to compete, but a US law firm job in London back in the day (and still to an extent today) was hard to come by.
Unless they merged with a large domestic firm, the Magic Circle would therefore not look to build a 400 lawyer office anytime soon, even if they were allowed.
In the longer term, however, I agree that more jobs for juniors would be created by the foreign firms, if they manage to make their offices here work.
Smaller international firms - perhaps some of them may have more interest in opening up here. Again, however, it won't be a swathe of them but they would likely trickle in by ones and twos and set up fairly niche practices.
Perhaps I have the wrong perception here and would be interested to hear your views, but dishonesty is not at work.
Thanks but it was not open criticism. We merely pointed out the sourcing of the data, which was not from official sources, since the faculty was unable to respond within the time frames they had promised several times.
'Hits back' is meant in terms of NLU Jodhpur proving wrong its critics (unsolicited apparently in other posts by readers) with strong recruitment results. If there's any agenda in some of our coverage we are trying to be more positive than negative by highlighting a number of other law schools that are doing well.
I agree, a congenial environment would be great but even if we wrote a really boring headline, as we have tried in the past, readers' comments would stay the same.
That does sound like rather a brilliant idea Poet.
Agree that you would lose the benefits of the tight collegiality and college ties though (and the MPL would probably be dead in the water), although it could be offset by the additional networks one creates across 4 or 5 campuses.
Perhaps most realistically in the short term, what could work is if several of the top national law schools decided to offer optional exchange programmes between a few schools for say 10 students every year, as long as they meet certain academic requirements.
Those students could, for example, spend 1 (or in future more) years away from their home campus. As soon as you sign up, you would have to commit to go wherever the lottery told you to go.
The benefits are many, since it is voluntary. 1. It would allow students to give back. 2. It would spread best (and worst) practices throughout the national law school system. 3. It would be a great cultural and learning experience for the student, with good CV points, and it would increase their network of contacts.
You are right about the curriculum though - but I do believe that the BCI has that on their agenda...
Absolutely - the main reason we went overboard with CLAT schools this week was because of the 'counselling' process for school selection that is currently taking place.
We have lots of non-national recruitment figures in the pipeline for next week, as many of those have been slower to respond with authoritative data than the NLUs.
Hi, thanks for your interest and sorry for the delay.
Funnily enough, I have no perfect solutions and if it was easy it would be done already.
One step that could help is greater transparency about the way the colleges operate, as we are trying to create with this and other coverage. Rather than students relying faithfully on rankings published by magazines or the brand-name, this would enable prospective applicants to make an educated call on where they want to spend the next five years.
I have the feeling that to date 90% of CLAT takers simply automatically by what CLAT training tutors tell them about what to note down as their first, second and third preferences when they fill in the application form. Please correct me if I am wrong. And to a certain extent, this serves them and the 'top-ranked' colleges well.
The new format of the CLAT, where students only decided after their scores where they go, may go some way towards levelling the playing field, since students can now apply their minds in real terms rather than in the abstract.
As I had mentioned once before, more controversially and radically, and perhaps unworkably, perhaps the importance of preferences should even be decreased altogether.
Germany, for instance, for certain subjects with high demand at publicly funded universities runs (or used to run) a lottery of sorts where applicants give several preferences that are allocated by a central board and rules. I think that you do have control over which college you do NOT want to go to in Germany but not necessarily certainty about your top choice.
If there were some objective way to decide that say 5 or so national law colleges are in a similar tier and impart a minimum required standard of education and quality (as the BCI has said it wants to do), the CLAT therefore could force candidates to give five, six or more college preferences, in addition to a veto on a few colleges. Out of those, providing the student makes the cut-off, one college will be randomly allotted to the candidate. This would presumably have to be introduced very gradually.
The theory behind this could be that national law schools are supposed to be a public good that are available to as many people as possible and not just constrained to a few elite institutions / 'centres of excellence'. Ideally, if all institutes were up to a certain minimum mark, a good student could become a great lawyer wherever they gained admission.
The results of this could be manyfold: 1. Each college will still get good candidates of a similar level that they would have had before, but there will be less of an us-versus-them mentality once there. 2. Recruiters will be more ready to look outside of just the top 1, 2 or 3 schools, because going perceptually by CLAT scores alone the talent pool will be distributed more evenly. 3. Colleges will be forced to focus on improving the campus experience and teaching so that their graduating students are more competitive and employable in the market place when they graduate, rather than just focusing on improving the brand to chase toppers. 4. The standards of all colleges will gradually be elevated as students realise they are not at a law school by entitlement but that it is up to them to raise the bar and keep improving the institution.
On the flipside: 1. This could also decrease the competitiveness of legal education as arguably a fifth-ranked college in preferences will still get good students so they may have less incentive to improve. 2. In the short term, it could marginally decrease the quality of graduates from a few top schools, although I believe there in terms of IQ or legal ability there will be only little to tell a CLAT rank of 10 and a rank of 250 apart. 3. Perhaps fewer students would take the CLAT? 4. An element of randomness feels less meritocratic, then again this proposal is more socialist than free market anyway. 5. It may be unfair and create resentments to some students when an institute burdened with an incompetent administration declines badly and they are stuck there for five years. 6. In the short term it does not help any of the colleges outside of the 'new first tier' of 3, 4, 5 or 6 colleges, and standards there would decrease further.
Just some thoughts - would be interested in other readers' ideas of how to improve competitiveness and standards across the spectrum.
Glad to hear you like! Sorry if I ever came across as curt but you were probably the fourth person telling us to write about the event you were probably referring to.
In addition, that event had already been covered by another publication and we saw little value or interest we could add in that case, since it was mainly a human interest story about one person's hobby.
We hope to cover more interesting extra-curricular activities and in particular alternative career paths in future though!
Thanks for your comment, agreed that 'arrange' is not technically correct but in a colloquial use in a headline and in a legal publication there is little risk of someone confusing the functionality of a law firm with that of a bank, so we will leave it as is for now. Thanks, Kian
I think it must be the permitted maximum batch size by HNLU under BCI rules?
Can anyone confirm. We had double checked the 48 figure as the total 2011 batch size with Mr Kutty. He said that a few students had also dropped out that year, which is why the number was slightly lower than the previous half-yearly batch.
Thanks for your comment. If you are referring to this particular thread, I do not see any particularly offensive comments (except for towards me).
We generally moderate comments about identifiable individuals.
But criticising a firm or offering an opinion about it or writing something negative should surely be permissible and not offend any one person unduly?
Generally, positive and negative comments seem to hold a balance (except for in the case of law school stories, apparently).
Do let me know your thoughts or if there was a specific comment you had in mind.
See my response to #1 above - such attitude may be slightly unconstructive and not every joins law to earn 10 lakh on graduation? In any case, such salaries are a very recent, and let's face it, minority phenomenon...
I hope that this is a tongue-in-cheek and ironic comment.
Nevertheless, I am wondering, is it reasonable for people to expect every college to provide 100% of the batch 'desk jobs' on graduation?
Do all of Nuals or every other graduating class want to join the Big Law? In any case there are probably only 100 to 200 high-paying desk law jobs in the whole of India, so it is no failing of a college or its students that not everyone can be placed in such.
And perhaps some by choice are joining their family practices, under the radar of the recruitment cell, or have other career options or are quite happy to practice in a local court in Kerala, for example?
I know there is a tendency for hyperbole in comments on law school recruitment but please try to keep this in check somewhat.
I also accept that this hyperbole has been somewhat accerbated by us by reporting too much about all the Big Law jobs available out there. We hope to remedy this balance in future.
I regret if the comment caused offence although I am not sure if it was meant in irony as a commentary on the general vitriol going around or if it was actually serious.
However, I believe that legally it is not possible to blanket defame an entire law school.
All the figures were given by Mr Sivanandan, who said that 5 would be going to NU Singapore.
If one student has now cancelled, he may not have been aware at the time of our chat and we can only report what was told to us by our source and do not rely on unattributed figures reported elsewhere.
Many thanks for this - our original story was unclear on the value of the deal. The valuation of the target is $3.2bn, the actual acquisition amount was less, you are right.
We regret the confusion and have amended the article.
I should mention - we are running a rolling recruitment tally on our wiki that has been updated by RCCs and now contains a good bunch of recruitment results of this season.
1.1 million hits is quite possible over several hours if everyone keeps refreshing the page. Everyone would have had to refresh 55 times to hit 1.1m - as the website was offline that is a possibility, with some having maybe refreshed considerably more often.
And bearing in mind that to get to the results page you have to navigate at least to three pages (making 3 hits), the 1.1m figure is also quite possible.
That was the clear idea, yes... We proceeded on the assumption that the top 3 CLAT colleges are fairly interchangable and most CLAT toppers will try to aim for one of those three when taking the CLAT.
As an aside, something is quite worrying me about the state of the nation, if you permit me to opine.
Have portions of India's youth become so scarred and jaded by all the high-profile and petty corruption around that all belief in a clean world has gone and been replaced by paranoia?
Thanks for your kind wishes, feedback and warning.
But at the outset I should correct your misapprehension, which is clearly caused by a lack of understanding of how journalism works (also, your idea of "proven fact" is a very loose one at best).
So here goes an unprecedented, uncensored behind-the-scenes look at the newsroom.
NLU Delhi sent out a press release last night about their admission test. The initial release looked a little boring to be honest and we were considering not running a story at all.
Then we looked into the figures a little more deeply, particularly the statistics of places per applicant, which worked out to a very similar ratio to what they are at top CLAT schools.
So, after Neha spoke to Ranbir Singh, we wrote the most interesting story and angle possible with the materials and facts available.
As I admitted before, the headline may have been guilty of sensationalism, but that is also the purpose of headlines.
Who would read a story called: '70 students pass the NLU Delhi admissions test'? And why would such a story matter to anyone?
Our job as journalists is to report the facts fairly, accurately and in an interesting manner. Plus, we like challenging the status quo and expectations at times, and making our readers think.
As you point out, we get suspected when we write about NLS to be taking money from NLS or being NLS alumni (both untrue). When we write about NUJS we get blamed for favouring that school, when we write about a law firm too much people suspect that we take money from them. Is there any way we can win here, except to shrug off the blame and repercussions and still attempt to write the best, most accurate and most interesting story possible?
And contrary to how corrupt everyone here seemingly assumes the India to be, to date we have never been offered money to surreptitiously write a news story. Nor have we ever solicited any of this kind of stuff and made it very clear (and just maybe that is also why no one has asked us). Finally, being completely blunt, knowing the Indian online market quite well now, even if we wanted to, the revenues from this kind of stuff would be very unexciting too and not worth the loss in credibility.
I can't speak for the big national newspapers or others in the legal space, but these are Legally India's views.
We did not look at the total size but only at the number of available places per applicant.
That ratio is a little bit higher at NLU Delhi right now than the top 3 CLAT schools, although this does not take into account how many eventually choose to accept their offers.
Sorry for the delay. There is no deadlien for entries and we will be taking interns throughout the year.
There is no slot available anymore between 29th May to 10th July, but after that there is still space.
We will liaise with bloggers individully to confirm times and dates.
Hi KittyKitten,
We do not have offices in Pune or Kochi, I'm afraid and can only offer full internships in Mumbai. Do send me an email if you have any questions or other arrangements you would like us to consider.
Just for the record, I should point out that nowhere in the article or in our conversation did Ranbir Singh say that NLU Delhi is as tough to get in as the other three colleges.
I chose an admittedly provocative headline purely on the basis of the numbers of applicants vs places, which is a common determinant used in judging how hard it is to get into a college.
Once the final results of choices and acceptances are out, we will do a follow-up analysis.
Fair point although at the moment it's impossible to say for sure what the toppers will ultimately pick.
But we will make sure we analyse the choices and performances of the NLU Delhi exam toppers once CLAT results are announced and report back.
As an aside, an interesting dynamic to consider this year: if the CLAT was really more 'random' this year then we might see quite a high divergence between NLU D toppers and CLAT toppers.
Anyone have any statistics or insight on whether those who topped the CLAT also topped last year's NLU D exam? And how many that applied to NLU D do not apply via CLAT, and vice versa?
We have updated the bottom of the story now with the full calculation and yes, we should have explained the full calculation right from the start - apologies.
Ok, the final calculation supports our headline even more strongly.
I have gone back to the source materials for CLAT 2010.
Including STs/SCs and other reservations such as NRI, etc: 121 places at NUJS 60 places at Nalsar 55 places at NLS
= 236 places at the most popular 3 NLSes.
17,300 total CLAT takers (2010) divided by 236 places = 1 in 73 chance of making NLS/Nalsar/NUJS cut-off in 2010.
NLU D this year (incl reservations): 79 out of 7814 = 1 in 99 chance of making NLU D cut-off.
So should the headline have read, NLU Delhi entrance now 25% tougher than NLS/Nalsar/NUJS last year?
I think that notwithstanding a big hike in CLAT takers this year, we will see total odds of getting into NLS/Nalsar/NUJS of 1 in 100 or thereabouts, although I do not have figures to back that up.
Does that sound reasonable?
We should have used clearer figures in the original story, but I think it is safe for us to stand by the headline as it is (although I do accept, yet again, that not all NLU D toppers can be certain to opt for NLU D, but that is another argument).
We will do more analysis once the CLAT results are out, you can be sure of that!
It's actually not quite 1 in 140 either at NLS/Nalsar/NUJS- please see my response to 11.1 above, since that figure compares the general list places vs the total CLAT takers.
(As I said, it is a back-of-the-envelope calculation)
@11.1 - you are not comparing apples with apples either here I think... 174 was the number of seats at NLS/Nalsar/NUJS last year EXCLUDING ST/SC and other reservations.
So the total percentage of CLATers opting for either NLS, NUJS or Nalsar could still be around 1 in 100.
I am not 100% sure of what the figure of seats for all those three was last year or is this year. Can someone confirm?
Of course, I didn't quite compare oranges and oranges either: the general list at NLU D was actually 62 out of 5575 - around 90 out of 100.
In any case, the point the article (and headline) are trying to make about the statistics is that they are very close to the top CLAT schools.
@7 and other posts: We do not have access to figures of how many places there were at the top three colleges this year.
The title states that NLU Delhi is now as tough to get in as the three others together, while the actual figures mentioned in the text are very clear that we are using 2010 figures.
Would changing the headline to: "NLU Delhi as tough as NLS, NUJS, Nalsar were last year" be better or make any material difference?
Technically, it might be more accurate, I agree, but journalistic headlines by necessity always summarise (and sensationalise) somewhat and in this case the headline would become even longer and more unreadable.
However, I would aruge that this doesn't detract from the principle that NLU Delhi's entrance exam is now in a similar ballpark in terms of competition as the national law schools (notwithstanding an unprecedented rise in the number of CLAT takers this year).
On top of that, I understand that the NLU Delhi test is semi-officially accepted by a few other institutions but not by 11 other national law schools as is the case with CLAT. Therefore it can be argued that more candidates sit the NLU-D test aiming for just 1 law school, whereas at CLAT many candidates would be very happy if they got into many of the 11 and hedge their bets so to speak.
Ergo, I think it's fair to say that this year's NLU D exam was as competitive as the CLAT for the top 3 law schools (last year), and by a tiny stretch also roughly as competitive as the CLAT fight for the top 3 is expected to be this year.
This does of course discount eventual student choices, which as I explained in 4.1 above, are not yet known.
Thanks for your comment, I accept that this is not hard scientific evidence for one being tougher than the other.
But talking in terms of pure numbers, the back of the envelope calculation indicates that there are fewer general list places per entrance exam taker at NLU Delhi than there were at NLS/NUJS/Nalsar last year.
We did not examine the eventual choices of the toppers (since we are not able to until CLAT results are released) but going purely by numbers it does seem as hard to get into NLU D's cut-off in the entrance test as it is to get into the most popular 3 CLAT schools.
Hi, thanks for your query but it really does depend on the quality and the quantity of the contributions. We would probably start out with a set number of Rupees per word, and the pay will be competitive with freelance journalism rates in India, but again those depend heavily on experience.
If you are interested, please do send us an application and I will be able to give you a better indication.
We do have a bit of an identity crisis in that some of Legally India is half-way between a blog and a straight news site - i.e., a community/commenting platform vs. a straightforward information delivery medium.
Sometimes comments can be helpful and genuinely insightful, also in increasing transparency - i.e., if a story is inaccurate, or the information supplied by a source or law firm is incorrect. It is a nice way of getting instant feedback on whatever we write.
But the flipside is also true, which is partly why the comments are hidden. On straight news stories where you feel comments may not be relevant (or you feel that comments are usually irrelevant), they will remain hidden unless you specifically click on the big green button.
Those who are not interested in irrelevant nonsense can then just safely ignore it. But that section of readers who enjoy precisely that aspect of Legally India can click to view the comments and enjoy them.
I do feel this is a decent enough compromise, although we will do our best to crack down harder on the utter nonsense and obscenity (we have just today added a profanity filter).
Do let me know your thoughts any time.
Best wishes,
Kian
Very good points. In order:
1. I explained the thinking behind NLU J hits back in the comments there - again, it wasn't entirely meant to stoke the fires but rather to silence them by showcasing NLU J's performance. And in fact, if I remember rightly, the comments on the NLU J article were a lot more civil than on others.
2. Yes, we have been meaning to do this properly for some time... Right now we have this database, which needs to be updated and completed.
http://www.legallyindia.com/wiki/Indian_law_firms
We will work on that hard in the coming months!
3. Agree fully on PGs - we've had such an initiative running for a good half year or so now but not very much response.
http://www.legallyindia.com/Accommodation-listing/
If you do read this, please please share your information in the forum. It just takes 5 minutes and it'll save lots of students' headaches and time in the long run. Plus there'll be more fun people in the hostels next time! If you think it may be good to do so, maybe we'll do a call as a main Legally India story for people to share their PGs to raise awareness?
4. Thanks for your feedback. We will add a filter that will ban some of the most offensive expletives from the comments.
Best regards
Kian
The headline may be showcasing a good recruitment result, which could in itself be provocative, although that is hardly our fault.
One of our aims with all this information being out in the public domain and readily available is that law students and recruiters really should be noticing that between many schools there is not much practical difference.
Of course the endless debate about which one out of a few placements are better is ridiculous, although I expect it is all at the same time somewhat tongue in cheek and some mild amusement.
Although sooner or later I hope everyone will have worn themselves out bickering and will accept that various schools can do well in different ways.
Apart from heavy-handed moderation or making our stories really really boring to where no one wants to read them anymore, please share ideas of how to make law school competition/debate take place with less vitriol.
Best wishes
Kian
I see your point but I think it's more complicated.
Most foreign firms would initially have a hard time in India and would presumably target only the big ticket work at which they can try to bill at rates comparable to London.
At the moment there is not a huge amount of big ticket M&A work around in India, and the big firms in India do have that market sewn up fairly well.
So a foreign firm that entered in the short term would likely build a very lean team that could get try and pick up the top work and do it profitably by charging billing rates closer to London or the US, so the local partners could integrate into existing locksteps.
Firms such as Talwar Thakore or Platinum close to UK firms clearly follow such a strategy. Those firms are not the largest recruiters at the moment.
Something similar happened in the London market, for example, when US firms came in. Unless they merged with a local player, most US firms did not take more than a handful of graduates to start with. They built lean outfits to support their overseas office. They did pay very large pay packages, which forced the rest of the market to up their rates to compete, but a US law firm job in London back in the day (and still to an extent today) was hard to come by.
Unless they merged with a large domestic firm, the Magic Circle would therefore not look to build a 400 lawyer office anytime soon, even if they were allowed.
In the longer term, however, I agree that more jobs for juniors would be created by the foreign firms, if they manage to make their offices here work.
Smaller international firms - perhaps some of them may have more interest in opening up here. Again, however, it won't be a swathe of them but they would likely trickle in by ones and twos and set up fairly niche practices.
Perhaps I have the wrong perception here and would be interested to hear your views, but dishonesty is not at work.
Best
Kian
'Hits back' is meant in terms of NLU Jodhpur proving wrong its critics (unsolicited apparently in other posts by readers) with strong recruitment results. If there's any agenda in some of our coverage we are trying to be more positive than negative by highlighting a number of other law schools that are doing well.
I agree, a congenial environment would be great but even if we wrote a really boring headline, as we have tried in the past, readers' comments would stay the same.
Best wishes,
Kian
Agree that you would lose the benefits of the tight collegiality and college ties though (and the MPL would probably be dead in the water), although it could be offset by the additional networks one creates across 4 or 5 campuses.
Perhaps most realistically in the short term, what could work is if several of the top national law schools decided to offer optional exchange programmes between a few schools for say 10 students every year, as long as they meet certain academic requirements.
Those students could, for example, spend 1 (or in future more) years away from their home campus. As soon as you sign up, you would have to commit to go wherever the lottery told you to go.
The benefits are many, since it is voluntary.
1. It would allow students to give back.
2. It would spread best (and worst) practices throughout the national law school system.
3. It would be a great cultural and learning experience for the student, with good CV points, and it would increase their network of contacts.
You are right about the curriculum though - but I do believe that the BCI has that on their agenda...
We have lots of non-national recruitment figures in the pipeline for next week, as many of those have been slower to respond with authoritative data than the NLUs.
Do get in touch any time if you can help.
Best regards
Kian
Funnily enough, I have no perfect solutions and if it was easy it would be done already.
One step that could help is greater transparency about the way the colleges operate, as we are trying to create with this and other coverage. Rather than students relying faithfully on rankings published by magazines or the brand-name, this would enable prospective applicants to make an educated call on where they want to spend the next five years.
I have the feeling that to date 90% of CLAT takers simply automatically by what CLAT training tutors tell them about what to note down as their first, second and third preferences when they fill in the application form. Please correct me if I am wrong. And to a certain extent, this serves them and the 'top-ranked' colleges well.
The new format of the CLAT, where students only decided after their scores where they go, may go some way towards levelling the playing field, since students can now apply their minds in real terms rather than in the abstract.
As I had mentioned once before, more controversially and radically, and perhaps unworkably, perhaps the importance of preferences should even be decreased altogether.
Germany, for instance, for certain subjects with high demand at publicly funded universities runs (or used to run) a lottery of sorts where applicants give several preferences that are allocated by a central board and rules. I think that you do have control over which college you do NOT want to go to in Germany but not necessarily certainty about your top choice.
If there were some objective way to decide that say 5 or so national law colleges are in a similar tier and impart a minimum required standard of education and quality (as the BCI has said it wants to do), the CLAT therefore could force candidates to give five, six or more college preferences, in addition to a veto on a few colleges. Out of those, providing the student makes the cut-off, one college will be randomly allotted to the candidate. This would presumably have to be introduced very gradually.
The theory behind this could be that national law schools are supposed to be a public good that are available to as many people as possible and not just constrained to a few elite institutions / 'centres of excellence'. Ideally, if all institutes were up to a certain minimum mark, a good student could become a great lawyer wherever they gained admission.
The results of this could be manyfold:
1. Each college will still get good candidates of a similar level that they would have had before, but there will be less of an us-versus-them mentality once there.
2. Recruiters will be more ready to look outside of just the top 1, 2 or 3 schools, because going perceptually by CLAT scores alone the talent pool will be distributed more evenly.
3. Colleges will be forced to focus on improving the campus experience and teaching so that their graduating students are more competitive and employable in the market place when they graduate, rather than just focusing on improving the brand to chase toppers.
4. The standards of all colleges will gradually be elevated as students realise they are not at a law school by entitlement but that it is up to them to raise the bar and keep improving the institution.
On the flipside:
1. This could also decrease the competitiveness of legal education as arguably a fifth-ranked college in preferences will still get good students so they may have less incentive to improve.
2. In the short term, it could marginally decrease the quality of graduates from a few top schools, although I believe there in terms of IQ or legal ability there will be only little to tell a CLAT rank of 10 and a rank of 250 apart.
3. Perhaps fewer students would take the CLAT?
4. An element of randomness feels less meritocratic, then again this proposal is more socialist than free market anyway.
5. It may be unfair and create resentments to some students when an institute burdened with an incompetent administration declines badly and they are stuck there for five years.
6. In the short term it does not help any of the colleges outside of the 'new first tier' of 3, 4, 5 or 6 colleges, and standards there would decrease further.
Just some thoughts - would be interested in other readers' ideas of how to improve competitiveness and standards across the spectrum.
Best regards
Kian
In addition, that event had already been covered by another publication and we saw little value or interest we could add in that case, since it was mainly a human interest story about one person's hobby.
We hope to cover more interesting extra-curricular activities and in particular alternative career paths in future though!
Best wishes
Kian
Can anyone confirm. We had double checked the 48 figure as the total 2011 batch size with Mr Kutty. He said that a few students had also dropped out that year, which is why the number was slightly lower than the previous half-yearly batch.
We generally moderate comments about identifiable individuals.
But criticising a firm or offering an opinion about it or writing something negative should surely be permissible and not offend any one person unduly?
Generally, positive and negative comments seem to hold a balance (except for in the case of law school stories, apparently).
Do let me know your thoughts or if there was a specific comment you had in mind.
Best wishes
Kian
My 2 cents...
Nevertheless, I am wondering, is it reasonable for people to expect every college to provide 100% of the batch 'desk jobs' on graduation?
Do all of Nuals or every other graduating class want to join the Big Law? In any case there are probably only 100 to 200 high-paying desk law jobs in the whole of India, so it is no failing of a college or its students that not everyone can be placed in such.
And perhaps some by choice are joining their family practices, under the radar of the recruitment cell, or have other career options or are quite happy to practice in a local court in Kerala, for example?
I know there is a tendency for hyperbole in comments on law school recruitment but please try to keep this in check somewhat.
I also accept that this hyperbole has been somewhat accerbated by us by reporting too much about all the Big Law jobs available out there. We hope to remedy this balance in future.
Best wishes,
Kian
However, I believe that legally it is not possible to blanket defame an entire law school.
If one student has now cancelled, he may not have been aware at the time of our chat and we can only report what was told to us by our source and do not rely on unattributed figures reported elsewhere.
We regret the confusion and have amended the article.
http://www.legallyindia.com/wiki/Campus_recruitment
Some are not 100% accurate and have not completed yet but they are a good indication.
And bearing in mind that to get to the results page you have to navigate at least to three pages (making 3 hits), the 1.1m figure is also quite possible.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Delhi-HC-blast-Plan-was-Perfect-but-bomb-was-dud/articleshow/8596775.cms
Although police have "no clue", apparently:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article2052291.ece
Have portions of India's youth become so scarred and jaded by all the high-profile and petty corruption around that all belief in a clean world has gone and been replaced by paranoia?
(Or have I just been trolled?)
But at the outset I should correct your misapprehension, which is clearly caused by a lack of understanding of how journalism works (also, your idea of "proven fact" is a very loose one at best).
So here goes an unprecedented, uncensored behind-the-scenes look at the newsroom.
NLU Delhi sent out a press release last night about their admission test. The initial release looked a little boring to be honest and we were considering not running a story at all.
Then we looked into the figures a little more deeply, particularly the statistics of places per applicant, which worked out to a very similar ratio to what they are at top CLAT schools.
So, after Neha spoke to Ranbir Singh, we wrote the most interesting story and angle possible with the materials and facts available.
As I admitted before, the headline may have been guilty of sensationalism, but that is also the purpose of headlines.
Who would read a story called: '70 students pass the NLU Delhi admissions test'? And why would such a story matter to anyone?
Our job as journalists is to report the facts fairly, accurately and in an interesting manner. Plus, we like challenging the status quo and expectations at times, and making our readers think.
As you point out, we get suspected when we write about NLS to be taking money from NLS or being NLS alumni (both untrue). When we write about NUJS we get blamed for favouring that school, when we write about a law firm too much people suspect that we take money from them. Is there any way we can win here, except to shrug off the blame and repercussions and still attempt to write the best, most accurate and most interesting story possible?
And contrary to how corrupt everyone here seemingly assumes the India to be, to date we have never been offered money to surreptitiously write a news story. Nor have we ever solicited any of this kind of stuff and made it very clear (and just maybe that is also why no one has asked us). Finally, being completely blunt, knowing the Indian online market quite well now, even if we wanted to, the revenues from this kind of stuff would be very unexciting too and not worth the loss in credibility.
I can't speak for the big national newspapers or others in the legal space, but these are Legally India's views.
I do welcome your response, as ever.
Yesterday's figure was due to a miscommunication and we have amended the article.
Sorry for any inconvience.
You can send and attach it anonymously over the Contact link in the top menu or just confidentially send me an email to my email address.
Plus we'll have to check the 4000 and 9000 figures with Ranbir Singh...
Thanks!
That ratio is a little bit higher at NLU Delhi right now than the top 3 CLAT schools, although this does not take into account how many eventually choose to accept their offers.
Sorry for the delay. There is no deadlien for entries and we will be taking interns throughout the year.
There is no slot available anymore between 29th May to 10th July, but after that there is still space.
We will liaise with bloggers individully to confirm times and dates.
Hi KittyKitten,
We do not have offices in Pune or Kochi, I'm afraid and can only offer full internships in Mumbai. Do send me an email if you have any questions or other arrangements you would like us to consider.
Best regards
Kian
I chose an admittedly provocative headline purely on the basis of the numbers of applicants vs places, which is a common determinant used in judging how hard it is to get into a college.
Once the final results of choices and acceptances are out, we will do a follow-up analysis.
But we will make sure we analyse the choices and performances of the NLU Delhi exam toppers once CLAT results are announced and report back.
As an aside, an interesting dynamic to consider this year: if the CLAT was really more 'random' this year then we might see quite a high divergence between NLU D toppers and CLAT toppers.
Anyone have any statistics or insight on whether those who topped the CLAT also topped last year's NLU D exam? And how many that applied to NLU D do not apply via CLAT, and vice versa?
Credit where it's due though: NLU Delhi did exceedingly well in the MPL this year and there seems to be a lot of demand for its entrance exam...
Rest assured that we will attempt a full and thorough analysis of preferences and cut-offs as we did last year.
Ok, the final calculation supports our headline even more strongly.
I have gone back to the source materials for CLAT 2010.
Including STs/SCs and other reservations such as NRI, etc:
121 places at NUJS
60 places at Nalsar
55 places at NLS
= 236 places at the most popular 3 NLSes.
17,300 total CLAT takers (2010) divided by 236 places = 1 in 73 chance of making NLS/Nalsar/NUJS cut-off in 2010.
NLU D this year (incl reservations): 79 out of 7814 = 1 in 99 chance of making NLU D cut-off.
So should the headline have read, NLU Delhi entrance now 25% tougher than NLS/Nalsar/NUJS last year?
I think that notwithstanding a big hike in CLAT takers this year, we will see total odds of getting into NLS/Nalsar/NUJS of 1 in 100 or thereabouts, although I do not have figures to back that up.
Does that sound reasonable?
We should have used clearer figures in the original story, but I think it is safe for us to stand by the headline as it is (although I do accept, yet again, that not all NLU D toppers can be certain to opt for NLU D, but that is another argument).
We will do more analysis once the CLAT results are out, you can be sure of that!
(As I said, it is a back-of-the-envelope calculation)
So the total percentage of CLATers opting for either NLS, NUJS or Nalsar could still be around 1 in 100.
I am not 100% sure of what the figure of seats for all those three was last year or is this year. Can someone confirm?
Of course, I didn't quite compare oranges and oranges either: the general list at NLU D was actually 62 out of 5575 - around 90 out of 100.
In any case, the point the article (and headline) are trying to make about the statistics is that they are very close to the top CLAT schools.
The title states that NLU Delhi is now as tough to get in as the three others together, while the actual figures mentioned in the text are very clear that we are using 2010 figures.
Would changing the headline to: "NLU Delhi as tough as NLS, NUJS, Nalsar were last year" be better or make any material difference?
Technically, it might be more accurate, I agree, but journalistic headlines by necessity always summarise (and sensationalise) somewhat and in this case the headline would become even longer and more unreadable.
However, I would aruge that this doesn't detract from the principle that NLU Delhi's entrance exam is now in a similar ballpark in terms of competition as the national law schools (notwithstanding an unprecedented rise in the number of CLAT takers this year).
On top of that, I understand that the NLU Delhi test is semi-officially accepted by a few other institutions but not by 11 other national law schools as is the case with CLAT. Therefore it can be argued that more candidates sit the NLU-D test aiming for just 1 law school, whereas at CLAT many candidates would be very happy if they got into many of the 11 and hedge their bets so to speak.
Ergo, I think it's fair to say that this year's NLU D exam was as competitive as the CLAT for the top 3 law schools (last year), and by a tiny stretch also roughly as competitive as the CLAT fight for the top 3 is expected to be this year.
This does of course discount eventual student choices, which as I explained in 4.1 above, are not yet known.
But talking in terms of pure numbers, the back of the envelope calculation indicates that there are fewer general list places per entrance exam taker at NLU Delhi than there were at NLS/NUJS/Nalsar last year.
We did not examine the eventual choices of the toppers (since we are not able to until CLAT results are released) but going purely by numbers it does seem as hard to get into NLU D's cut-off in the entrance test as it is to get into the most popular 3 CLAT schools.
If you are interested, please do send us an application and I will be able to give you a better indication.