The Consortium of National Law Universities has unveiled a comprehensive report by an Expert Committee aimed at reforming the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT). Despite the recommendations, these reforms will not be applicable to the 2027 CLAT, as the Consortium has decided to defer any changes until 2028.
The Expert Committee, co-chaired by Prof. Dev Saif Gangjee from the University of Oxford and Prof. Tarunabh Khaitan of the London School of Economics, submitted its findings to the Consortium’s Advisory Board on February 2, 2026. Key among the recommendations is the exclusion of the National Testing Agency (NTA) from setting the exam paper, eliminating the General Knowledge section, and enhancing accessibility for candidates unable to afford coaching.
Ruling Out the NTA
The report highlights the need to professionalize the exam process by examining questions from previous papers. It cited issues such as a question on Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ where the answer merely repeated a line from the passage, and a question on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, which had multiple valid answers. Additionally, a question regarding online defamation was criticized for lacking a correct answer and was subsequently removed.
Criticism extended to the postgraduate exam, where questions required candidates to translate a Latin legal maxim and identify a dissenting opinion, focusing more on recall than legal reasoning. The report noted a significant increase in passage length, with the 2023 undergraduate paper containing 5,404 words across 12 passages, escalating to 8,954 words across 24 passages in 2024. Although there was a slight decrease to 8,413 words in 2025, it remained a challenge within the same two-hour limit.
The Supreme Court had previously expressed dissatisfaction with the exam’s conduct, citing a 2025 judgment on disputed CLAT questions that condemned the casual framing of the paper. The report proposes either an external tender process or developing in-house expertise, accompanied by peer reviews and standardized drafting benchmarks, to set the exam. Currently, this responsibility rotates among Convenor universities annually.
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The report also advises against involving the NTA, referencing a Parliamentary Standing Committee’s finding that five out of 14 competitive exams conducted by the NTA faced significant issues. It calls for establishing a standing ‘Exam Board’ to review each year’s paper, strengthening the Consortium Secretariat, and appointing a time-bound Steering Committee to oversee these processes.
Eliminating General Knowledge
The Committee suggests reducing the undergraduate paper from five sections to three, removing the General Knowledge and Current Affairs sections. Proposed changes include:
- Combining Logical Reasoning and Legal Aptitude sections to assess the application of rules to facts and the derivation of rules without prior legal knowledge.
- Renaming the English Language section to Language and Comprehension, focusing on inference, tone, and argument strength rather than vocabulary or grammar.
- Retaining the Quantitative Techniques section, emphasizing the interpretation of numerical data and patterns over advanced math skills.
Each section would contain no more than 10 to 15 questions, maintaining the two-hour format. While a full essay component was considered, it was rejected due to concerns about fair assessment at scale. The idea may be revisited in three years.
For postgraduate exams, the report recommends keeping the three reformed sections with reduced weight and adding two new ones: a Legal Knowledge section focusing on developments from the two years prior, and a Problem Question section presenting candidates with legal problems from various law fields.
Enhancing Accessibility
The report distinguishes between broad access to legal education and the specific fairness of the CLAT design. It notes that coaching often provides informational rather than aptitude-building advantages. To mitigate this, the Consortium could offer free resources such as sample papers and explanatory videos in multiple languages.
Collaboration with organizations like Increasing Diversity by Increasing Access (IDIA) is recommended. However, the issue of conducting CLAT in regional languages is currently sub judice and beyond the report’s scope.
The Committee’s recommendations were shaped by 667 public feedback responses collected in late 2025, along with inputs from Consortium Vice-Chancellors. Despite this, the Consortium’s Governing Body decided on July 18 to maintain the current exam structure for CLAT 2027, deferring the Committee’s suggestions to a separate committee for consideration for CLAT 2028.
