The 2023 edition of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) is slated to be conducted in offline mode on December 18, 2022 - in the middle of the academic year of students appearing for 12th boards.

The Consortium of National Law Universities (NLUs) announced that applications to register for the exam are open from today. Prospective applicants can log in to the official website of the Consortium to register.

The last date for application is November 13, 2022.

For this edition of CLAT, the Consortium will introduce new features for students, including scheduling of two rounds of 'open campus visit days', where registered students will get an opportunity to visit the campuses of the 22 participating NLUs.

Additionally, the Consortium has also proposed to release two rounds of sample question sets for students. Prior to this, sample question sets were only released for CLAT 2020.

Speaking to Bar & Bench, Director of Law Prep Tutorial Anupama Joshi said,

"Students are going to think whether they have sufficient time or not since the exam is happening early. Going by precedent from the last 2 years, I think it is a possibility that form dates could extend or the exam may get postponed, because lot of State boards have pre-boards during the same time period, which could lead to clash. But students should positively prepare to take the exams as per the schedule that is out by the Consortium."

Emphasising on the need for the Consortium to clarify nuances of the admission process, Joshi said,

"It would be good on the part of the Consortium if they could clarify to students and their parents about the admission process given the early timelines. Currently it is difficult to figure what happens in case of students' pre-boards or half-yearly exams clash with the CLAT exam."