CLAT 2018: No SC interference for counselling 1st round

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to interfere with the first round of counselling going on for admissions to 19 prestigious law colleges of the country after the CLAT examination.

A vacation bench of Justices U U Lalit and Deepak Gupta directed National University of Advanced Legal Studies (NUALS) at Kochi to complete by June 15 the exercise of compensating students who have faced technical glitches in the CLAT 2018 examination.

The bench asked NULAS to come up with a revised list by June 16 based on the formula suggested by two member-Grievance Redressal Committee (GRC) and include the qualified students in the second round of counselling.

The apex court had on June 11 refused to order a "re-test" of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2018 or stop the counselling process for admissions in 19 national prestigious law colleges across the country over complaints of technical glitches during the May 13 exam.

The court had asked the GRC to look into complaints, to apply the normalisation formula to compensate for the time lost by students during the exam.

The committee has suggested that students, who suffered time loss due to technical glitches, can be awarded compensatory marks after taking note of data of total correct and incorrect answers given by them during the online test.

Around 54,450 candidates had undertaken CLAT 2018 at 258 centres for admissions in 19 national law colleges.

NUALS, which conducted CLAT with the aid of private firm M/s Sify Technologies Ltd for admissions in undergraduate and postgraduate law programmes at premier law schools, had constituted a two-member panel to look into complaints following the apex court's direction.

Earlier, on June 6, the court had refused to stay the counselling process and had said that any steps in the matter would be subject to further orders of the apex court.

Soon after the May 13 exam, several pleas were filed in six different high courts across the country and also in the apex court seeking quashing of CLAT alleging inconsistencies and technical glitches during the online test.