With a final spurt of more than 3,000 LLB and LLM applicants registering for the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT), just a few hours after our report last week (on 31 March) and before the 1159pm deadline.

A total of 44,576 LLB applicants registered for CLAT 2017, which recorded growth of 11.4% since CLAT 2016, second only to CLAT 2015’s record growth rate of 14%.

6,108 LLM applicants also eventually registered for the exam, 8% higher than last year’s figure.

The total number of applications, 50,684, is still not the final tally though, as payments for some applications are pending, said SP Singh, registrar at CNLU Patna which is the law school convening the CLAT 2017.

Almost one-fifth of the applicants this year are from Delhi (7,776 applications). Lucknow (2,714) and Bhopal (2,660) were the other cities from where most applicants registered.

Singh said that CNLU did not have the total tally for the number of LLB applicants who were above the court-overruled age limit of 20 years that the BCI had earlier imposed on this year’s applicants, at the time of going to press.

The odds for a candidate from the general category to make it to one of the LLB seats offered in CLAT 2017 now stands at about 2.1% as applicants are competing for 1,154 unreserved LLB seats (and 389 unreserved LLM seats) across the 18 participating NLUs this year.