A writ petition has been filed in the Rajasthan high court’s Jaipur bench by a Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2015 applicant, claiming that at least 15 questions remained obviously incorrect or were impossible, after having asked senior counsel and other experts to try and solve them.
Civil writ petition 7970 of 2015, Rashi Mangal vs UOI and Others, was heard yesterday with advocate Dinesh Yadav appearing for the petitioners, said Rajesh Mangal, who is a chartered accountant (CA) and father of Rashi Mangal.
Rajesh Mangal said that the court had served notice on the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) convenor, RMLNLU Lucknow, adding: “The honourable judge has taken it very seriously.”
Mangal said that they had asked for the publication of the full merit list of all candidates, as it had been done in previous years such as by GNLU Gandhinagar.
Second, he said that nearly 30 general knowledge questions had been copied from a single source – GKToday.in – as reported by Legally India on 7 June.
Finally, they had originally challenged 18 questions that either had incorrect answers on the model answer sheet or were impossible to answer either at all, or because of typographical errors.
Three of those questions had been accepted as incorrect by the CLAT convenors’ expert committee, since filing, said Mangal.
However, 15 wrong answers remained. He said that he had sent three legal reasoning questions to a “very senior advocate of Jaipur”, who replied that the answer should be different to whatever was supplied by the CLAT.
Furthermore, several other questions were also wrong, such as the infamous question 56, asking for the “world’s largest e-commerce company”, and supplying both Alibaba and Amazon as answers.
Questions 169 to 173, which relied on a complex puzzle with a table (see below), was impossible because in the last cell of the table, there was a typo where the number should have been 46 rather than 26.
Mangal said that he gave the wrong puzzle to Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) experts, who were unable to answer three out of five of those questions. When changing the number 26 in the puzzle to 46, they were able to solve the puzzle in two minutes.
Question number 10 was also incorrect, with the model answer key requiring substitution of “attached” into the following sentence, rather than “impounded”: “Royalties and trust funds can be ____________________, automobiles may be seized and auctioned off.”
Being a CA, Mangal said that the “right answer must be impounded” under the income tax act.
He also pointed out question 25, which required matching of the word pair “dulcet : raucous” to a similarly antonymous pair. The answer key provided “crazy : insane”, as the correct answer, but Mangal said that the CLAT answer was actually copied incorrectly from another entrance test source that had specified “crazy : sane” as the correct answer.
CLAT convenor and RMLNLU joint registrar Dr JD Gangwar said that he could not comment on the petition, as they were not yet aware of the petition or served with notice.
Story to be updated – we have requested a copy of the full writ petition.
Comments
As a non-interested party to the process I can hardly understand how the CLAT stumbles over what seems like 'not that difficult an exam to conduct' (hardly 40/k students) every year! Hopefully the relief being sought is more than mere 'correction' of errors in this year, but a larger systemic correction of the process.
These authorities playing with the lives of students ought to be taught a lesson
Finally Lucknow NLU chief and convener are laughing because no action against them and they will never resign for their, this shoddy responsibility.
Other candidates are from coaching institute clat possible
Does it provide questions to CLAT experts for the exam? That is the only thing one ought to be interested in while choosing a coaching center after this year.