NEWS: Petition filed in SC for Quashing and Re-conducting of CLAT 2020

A petition has been filed in Supreme Court by bunch of CLAT 2020 aspirants, that the conduct of entrance exam violated Articles 14 & 15. The petitioners pray the court for quashing the exam and seeking direction to the Consortium to re-conduct the exam.

The petition has put up many grievances faced by the CLAT 2020 aspirants due to technical glitches during the online exam, which was held on 28^th September.

The petition mentions various issues faced by the aspirants during the online exam:

• The candidates have chosen/selected/ticked correct answers; however, it is reflecting in a result that us wrong and/or different options have been chosen/selected/ticked.
• The result is displaying and calculating marks in those questions, which were not even attempted by the candidates.
• 10 questions are either wrongs themselves, or their answers which are uploaded on the website are wrong.
• Candidates have chosen/selected/ticked different options; however, in the results, different answers are shown as chosen/selected/ticked.

The Answer key to the online exam was published on the same day of the exam to invite any objections.

The aspirants contented that the results declared by the Consortium are, therefore, “wrong, erroneous, and incorrect” and, as such, “biased”.

In response to it, there were some changes made in the answer key subsequently, wherein the Consortium decided to drop some questions from the exam and modified answers for a couple of others.

Later, candidates were allotted provisional marks on 30^th September. And on October 3^rd, a press statement was issued by the CLAT Consortium defending the software used to conduct the exam, stating that the large number of objections received from candidates was owing to the procedure being kept free of cost.

This, the petition claims was an “arrogant” move by the Consortium. The petition says,

“…neither grievance committee nor the consortium looked into the issues of objections / grievances filed by the petitioners / aspirants in large numbers, however, dealt the same with biased approach in very arrogant way vide their press release dated 03.10.2020.”