Students aspiring to become lawyers take the CLAT exam on one fine afternoon (May 13, 2018) not realising that a disaster was awaiting. It is a disgrace that a national level examination which has the capacity to decide the future of students can be conducted in such a lousy manner. The examination which was to start at 3 PM was delayed by 30 minutes at my centre maybe because we were just unfortunate. But later it was found that many centres had the examination going on until 8 PM.
It is pathetic to learn that an examination which shapes future lawyers does not have its own set of laws or rules. The examination not only caused delay but also an immense inconvenience to the students because the screen froze every five minutes, the answers marked by students were not getting recorded, and the students also lost time because of the not-so-friendly interface implemented for the first time this year.
The paper consists of 200 questions which are to be answered in 120 minutes, so you can’t afford to lose a single minute but considering the software and interface it seemed that the CLAT conducting committee is hardly concerned about the students. The worst part is that in places like Jaipur the invigilators were super “austere”. They were so strict that they occasionally out of the rooms furnishing the students with opportunities to discuss the questions where as in other places the invigilators were so “magnanimous” that they neither cared to listen to the complaints of students in between the exam nor compensate for the time lost because of their negligence.
I guess CLAT 2018 was the worst administered. No other national level examination is in as much in controversy as CLAT. It is high time that an action is taken. Students should not be harassed unnecessarily.