CLAT 2019 TO BE CONDUCTED OFFLINE

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) will be rolled back to the offline mode from 2019. The decision was taken at the fourth meeting of the Consortium of National Law Universities, which is headed by Prof Faizan Mustafa, vice-chancellor of NALSAR Hyderabad on Thursday.

A press release stated, “Keeping in view that in last few years there have been glitches due to the fault of the service provider in the conduct of the online CLAT examination, the CLAT Consortium unanimously resolved that CLAT-2019 will be conducted Off-line. It was also resolved that as and when number of candidates taking up CLAT drastically increases or when admission to law colleges in the entire country would be based only on the CLAT score, the feasibility of online test will be considered.”

In its earlier meeting this month, the Consortium had taken a historic decision to constitute a Permanent Secretariat for the conduct of CLAT at NLSIU. Wednesday’s meeting also saw the inauguration of this Permanent CLAT Secretariat by Chairman, Prof Faizan Mustafa (Vice-Chancellor of NALSAR, Hyderabad) and Vice-President, Prof V Vijayakumar (Vice-Chancellor, NLIU, Bhopal).

The permanent CLAT Secretariat was inaugurated by Prof. Faizan Mustafa and Prof. V. Vijayakumar who is Vice-Chancellor, NLIU, Bhopal and the Vice-President of the Consortium, in the newly constructed building of NLSIU, Bangalore in the presence of other Vice Chancellors as reported by LiveLaw.

The CLAT Secretariat is intended to function throughout the year from its permanent office at Bangalore. Pursuant to ensuring the stable conduct of CLAT, the Consortium has also decided that a permanent website for CLAT will be created.

The consortium further resolved that in the LL.M. admission test, some subjective portion would also be included in 2019 PG CLAT. The details of subjective portion would be worked out by the CLAT Executive Committee which consists of the Vice-Chancellor, NLSIU, Bangalore; Vice-Chancellor, NALSAR, Hyderabad; Vice-Chancellor, NLIU, Bhopal as ex-officio members; Vice-Chancellor, NLUO, Cuttack as Convenor, CLAT-2019 and Prof. Paramjit S. Jaswal, Vice-Chancellor, RGNUL, Patiala as nominee of the CLAT Convenor.

In order to improve the quality of the CLAT question paper, a question bank will be created, enabling experts from all the NLUs and other institutions to contribute. Further in each State, in addition to NLUs, CLAT will be conducted in other centers’/cities as well, depending upon the number of candidates. The decision in this respect too would be taken by CLAT Convenor and Executive Committee. A workshop will be held in collaboration with NAAC and UGC on evolving objective parameters for the accreditation of NLUs by NAAC and other accreditation agencies.

By-
Anany Upadhyay
Student Reporter – INBA