Don't let NTA set paper, scrap General Knowledge, widen access: Expert committee's suggestions for CLAT

The Consortium of National Law Universities on Wednesday published the Expert Committee's report on reforming the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT).

Although no reforms will apply to CLAT 2027, the report recommends ruling out the National Testing Agency (NTA) as paper-setter, scrapping the exam's General Knowledge section and widening access for candidates who cannot afford coaching.

The report was prepared by a five-member Expert Committee that was co-convened by Prof Dev Saif Gangjee of the University of Oxford and Prof Tarunabh Khaitan of the London School of Economics. It was submitted to the Consortium's Advisory Board on February 2, 2026.

To make its case for professionalising the exam, the report has cited questions from past papers.

In one question from the English Language section about Shakespeare's Macbeth, the correct answer restated a line from the passage itself. In another question on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, the report found that the question had multiple defensible answers among its options. A separate question testing knowledge of online defamation was flagged as having no correct answer among any of its four options and was later withdrawn.

The postgraduate paper also drew similar criticism. Questions cited in the report asked candidates to translate a Latin legal maxim, recall the year a specific tribunal was established and identify a judge's dissenting opinion. This, as per the report, tests recall rather than legal reasoning.

The report further notes that passage lengths have grown as well. It counted 5,404 words across 12 passages in the 2023 undergraduate paper and 8,954 words across 24 passages in 2024, a jump of roughly 66 per cent, before easing slightly to 8,413 words in 2025, within the same two-hour time limit.

The report notes that the Supreme Court had voiced dissatisfaction with how the exam was conducted as far back as 2018. It also notes that a 2025 Supreme Court judgment on disputed CLAT questions expressed "deep anguish regarding the callous and casual manner" in which the paper had been framed.

To fix this, the report recommends professionalising the setting of the exam either through an external tender or by building in-house expertise, alongside peer review of draft questions and standardised drafting benchmarks. Currently, this responsibility is rotated annually among Convenor universities.

The report explicitly ruled out involving the NTA, citing a Parliamentary Standing Committee finding that of 14 competitive exams the NTA conducts, "at least 5 faced major issues." It also calls for a standing "Exam Board" to review each year's paper before it is finalised, a strengthened Consortium Secretariat and a time-bound Steering Committee to oversee it all.

The Committee recommends cutting the undergraduate paper from 5 sections to 3, dropping General Knowledge and Current Affairs altogether. Other suggestions include:

Logical Reasoning and Legal Aptitude would merge the current Legal Reasoning and Logical Reasoning sections. This, to test both the application of given rules to a set of facts and the derivation of rules from a set of facts, without benefit from prior legal knowledge.

Language and Comprehension would replace English Language, testing inference, tone and the strength of an argument rather than vocabulary or grammar.

Quantitative Techniques would be retained largely as is, with the report stressing that it should test the interpretation of numerical information and patterns rather than advanced mathematical knowledge. Each section would carry no more than 10 to 15 questions within the same two-hour format.

A full essay component was considered and rejected for now, over concerns about assessing tens of thousands of responses fairly and at scale. The Committee has suggested revisiting the idea after 3 years.

For postgraduate papers, the report has recommended retaining the 3 reformed sections at a reduced weightage and adding two new ones.

A Legal Knowledge section would test developments from only the 2 years preceding the exam, with the report suggesting that questions test doctrine and its application rather than trivia. A fifth, constructed-response Problem Question section would ask candidates to choose and solve one of three legal problems drawn from public, private, commercial or international law.

The report draws a distinction between broad access to legal education, which was outside its mandate, and the narrower question of whether the CLAT's own design unfairly favours some candidates.

It notes that much of what coaching institutes offer is informational rather than aptitude-building. This information, the report says, the Consortium could itself provide free of cost, and recommends that the Consortium regularly publish sample papers, explanatory videos and other exam-related material, including in languages other than English, to reduce that dependence.

It also endorses closer collaboration with organisations such as Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA). Concerns about conducting the CLAT in regional languages, the report notes, are currently sub judice and fall outside its remit.

The Committee's recommendations followed 667 responses received during a public feedback window in late 2025, in addition to suggestions from Vice-Chancellors across the Consortium.

None of this, however, will apply to CLAT 2027 after the Consortium's Governing Body decided on July 18 to leave the exam's pattern and syllabus unchanged, holding the Committee's recommendations for a separate committee that will examine them ahead of CLAT 2028.