The Supreme Court on Friday did not pass any interim order of relief for several aspirants who complained about the conduct of the online Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) of 2020.
A three-judge Bench led by Justice Ashok Bhushan refused to stay the counselling and admission process of national law universities based on the CLAT 2020 marks.
The court asked those who had approached it to make a representation of their complaints about the conduct of the CLAT before the Grievances Redressal Committee.
The petitioners, represented by senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, alleged that the CLAT and evaluation was “erroneous, faulty, defective, discriminatory and violative of fundamental rights of the Constitution”.
The petition had been filed by several students from across the country led by Uttar Pradesh-based Lavanya Bhatt. They urged the apex court to quash the exam and order it to be re-conducted.
Plea for panel
The plea further asked the court to direct the consortium to set up a high-powered committee to examine the numerous complaints about “software glitches” and mismatched questions and answers so that students are not put in a dilemma. The petition said a foolproof mechanism should be built to avoid these problems in the future.
The online CLAT 2020 was conducted on September 28. The complaints about the exam included results displaying answers different from the ones ticked; results displaying or calculating marks for questions that were not even attempted by the candidates; 10 wrong questions followed by erroneous answers, etc.
The petition also complained about the “unreasonable lengthy design of the CLAT examination”.
Over 75000 candidates applied for CLAT, while 68833 downloaded the admit cards. Over 86% took the exam across 300 centres, the petition mentioned.