Tamil Nadu - Chennai

300 city students take first common law test

— PHOTO: R. RAGU

Battle of the brains: Students taking the CLAT at Presidency College in Chennai on Sunday.

CHENNAI: Over 300 city students were among the 11,500 students from across India who wrote the first Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) on Sunday. Over 1,100 seats in the best law schools across the country are up for grabs.

This first CLAT is an attempt to cut down on multiple entrance examinations as a result of a Supreme Court directive.

This year, it is an entry requirement for the seven national law schools at Bangalore, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Kolkata, Jodhpur, Raipur and Ahmedabad, which have joined hands to create the CLAT, as well as three National Law Universities at Patna, Lucknow and Patiala.

“Instead of writing seven separate examinations, it was easier to write one common paper,” said Sai Vasundara, a Pondicherry-based student, who wrote the examination in the Chennai centre at Presidency College.

Chennai student Vaishnavi K. Nair agreed. “I’m a science student and I only started preparing for the law entrance after engineering entrance exams finished, so it would have been harder to manage if I had to write several more exams,” she said.

Drushya Sridhar, a Bangalore-based student who wrote the CLAT in Chennai, said it’s a mixed blessing. “It’s a lot less taxing on you, but if you mess up that one exam, you’re out. It’s putting all your chickens in one basket,” she said.

Students all agreed that the paper was not too hard. “The English and legal reasoning sections were quite easy, but the logical reasoning was tough, since all the answers seemed the same,” said Chennai student Anirudh Ravichander.

The paper was entirely objective-type, with 190 questions for 200 marks, divided into five sections — general knowledge, English, mathematics, legal reasoning and logical reasoning.

A. Rajan, director of Sridhar Law Academy, which coached two-thirds of the 316 Chennai candidates, felt that any student aware of what is happening around him and capable of reasoning logically could have done well on the CLAT.

The abolition of negative marking, subjective questions and detailed questions on the Constitution, as well as the convenience of a common test, would all attract more students to attempt the examination, he said.

While no Tamil Nadu institutions are part of the CLAT this year, convenor V. Vijaykumar hopes to bring all law schools in the country under its aegis within the next five years.

Dr. Vijaykumar, also the registrar of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, feels that independence is essential to achieve his goal. “We need a separate establishment for the CLAT with a permanent address … either in Bangalore or in Delhi,” he said. Currently, the plan is for the seven law schools to rotate the responsibility of conducting CLAT amongst themselves every year.

Dr. Vijaykumar also felt that a regulation by the University Grants Commission and the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development would be important.

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