Aspirants Petition Supreme Court for Quashing CLAT 2020

From NLSIU wanting to conduct its own entrance exam instead of CLAT to a fake notification gong viral about its postponement, CLAT 2020 has been surrounded by controversies. This year after a lot of ruckus the entrance exam was finally held on September 28. However, the buzz around CLAT 2020 doesn’t seem to end.

CLAT aspirants complained of facing technical lags during the conduct of the online entrance exam. Some CLAT takers have moved the Supreme Court against that the technical hindrances faced by them 

Petition seeks a declaration that the conduct of CLAT 2020 violated Articles 14 and 15

The petition seeks a declaration that the conduct of Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2020 violated Articles 14 and 15 of the Constitution of India. The petition highlights grievances faced by many aspirants due to alleged technical glitches during the exam.

Petition seeks formation of a high powered committee to look into the complaints

The petitioners have requested the top court to direct the CLAT Consortium to set up a high powered committee to look into the complaints lodged and grievances raised by the students. Further, petitioners have also prayed to the Court for a direction to re-conduct the exam without any technical difficulties. 

Some of the issues faced by the petitioners are listed below:

1. The candidates had chosen/selected/ticked correct answers; however, it reflected in a result that us wrong and/or different options have been chosen/selected/ticked.
2. The result displayed and calculated marks in those questions, which were not even attempted by the candidates.
3. 10 questions in the exam were either wrong themselves, or their answers which were uploaded on a website were wrong.
4. The instructions for the exam were vague and arbitrary.
5. The exam had about 18,600 words to be read in the 120-minute time span permitted to answer the exam. The petitioners added that this posed a disadvantage from students from non-English medium backgrounds.

CLAT Consortium published the answer key on the same day of exams in order to invite objections, if any, by the next day.  After this, provisional marks were allocated to the candidates on September 30.

CLAT consortium releases a press statement defending the software in question

On October 3, a press statement was issued by the CLAT Consortium defending the software used to conduct the exam. The Consortium acknowledged that the large number of objections received from candidates. They pointed out that the glitches experienced by the CLAT aspirants were owing to the procedure being kept free of cost.

The petition labels the Consortium’s move as arrogant. The petition says,

"...neither the grievance committee nor the consortium looked into the issues of objections/grievances filed by the petitioners/aspirants in large numbers, however, dealt the same with a biased approach in a very arrogant way vide their press release dated 03.10.2020."