New Delhi (ILNS): The Supreme Court today directed CLAT aspirants to submit their grievances before the Grievance Redressal Committee within three days on a petition seeking a retest of CLAT 2020. The plea says that the test was “erroneous, faulty, defective, discriminatory and violative of Articles 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution.”
Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayan, appearing for the petitioners, submitted that around 20,000 objections were raised with respect to technical software issues. The petitioners’ grievance is that the students were not able to put forth the answers they wanted to feed.
“In the facts of the present case, we are of the view that ends of justice be served in giving liberty to the petitioners to submit a representation to the Grievance Redressal Committee with regard to their grievance within three days from today. We order accordingly. We have no doubt that the petitioners’ representation be considered by the Committee at an early date,” said the Court.
The bench, headed by Justice Ashok Bhushan, was hearing a petition filed by five CLAT aspirants who have appeared in CLAT 2020 and have contended that the results declared by the Consortium of National Law University (NLU) are totally wrong, erroneous and therefore biased due to the following reasons:
· The candidates have chosen/selected/ticked correct answers; however, it is reflecting in result that wrong & 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.
· Candidates have chosen/selected/ticked different options; however, in result different answers are shown as chosen /selected /ticked.
· 10 questions are either wrong, or their answers which are uploaded on website are wrong.
The petitioners have further highlighted that the question paper and the answer key in CLAT 2020 paper was full of errors where many questions were such that all four options provided in the question were wrong.
The petitioners have also placed before the Court their grievances relating to unreasonably lengthy design of examination which is stated to have had about 18,600 words to be read in the 120-minute to answer the exam which proved to be disadvantageous to candidates belonging to non-English background.
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Highlighting the technical glitches faced by students during the exam held on September 28, the petitioners have further urged the Court to direct the Consortium of NLU to set up a high-powered committee to examine the complaints regarding “software glitch‟ and other objections raised by the students in reference of mismatch between answers marked and answers recorded so as to ensure that the problems do not recur in the next round of CLAT 2020.
Read the order here;
21538-2020-34-17-24361-Order-09-Oct-2020-ILNS