Revealed CLAT expert committee's reasons for believing all questions were correct

Revealed: CLAT expert committee's reasons for believing all questions were correct The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) 2015‟s committee of “experts”, defended the allegedly error-ridden CLAT 2015 LLB question paper through its report reproducing dictionary definitions of words and asserting that candidates were expected to “feel the pulse” of the question paper.

A right to information (RTI) request has revealed the report of the second expert committee formed after the results of CLAT 2015. In the report, the expert committee provides its reasoning, separately for each of 30 questions, on how it concluded that those were not errors.

The committee apparently believes that critics “censor”, instead of “censure” a movie and that the antonyms “dulcet and raucous” match more with the synonyms “crazy and insane” than with the antonyms “palliative and exacerbated”.

The committee, which was formed on the orders of the Bombay high court, had submitted its report in a sealed cover to the Punjab & Haryana high court. According to CLAT 2015 convenor RMLNLU Lucknow, the expert committee had reported that none of the alleged errors placed before it were, in fact, errors.

CLAT candidates had sent a question on filling the blanks in sentences, with the most appropriate words from the options given, for review to the expert committee. This was as follows: “Regretfully I have to decline your invitation. The critics censored/censured the new movie because of its social unacceptability.”

According to the answer key, the correct answer option was “censored” instead of “censured”. CLAT candidates argued that the correct option was “censured”. The experts defended the answer key, by simply reproducing the Merriam Webster meaning of the two words in their report, and offering no further explanation.

Similarly, candidates had sent a question asking them to mark the most corresponding word combination to the antonym combination of “dulcet:raucous”. The answer key had marked the synonym combination of “crazy:insane” as the correct answer option, whereas candidates asserted to the expert committee that the antonym combination of “palliative:exacerbated” was the correct option.

The committee‟s reasoning in the report: “Prima facie both the words seem to be antonymous. Since this is a question of comprehension the examinee is expected to feel the pulse of it, and naturally that way „dulcet‟ will give ironical sense of “sweet and soothing”. Hence the correct answer is “crazy:insane”.”

Rmlnlu has already rejected an RTI asking for the composition of the expert committee, and the Bombay high court has dismissed a fresh plea filed by the the same petitioner who obtained the order directing the formation of the expert committee.