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The mysterious presence of Doubtful Questions Leaving Aspirants Bewildered

The mysterious presence of Doubtful Questions Leaving Aspirants Bewildered

Abhay Singh October 28, 2024 8 Min

The mysterious presence of Doubtful Questions Leaving Aspirants Bewildered

I would like to begin this article by quoting Tim Fargo who said “Removing a doubt is like removing a Blindfold”. And the removal of this blindfold is of utmost importance in competitive exams like CLAT, AILET, CUET, etc. Conducting such exams in which the aspirations of lakhs of students are at stake requires  a great amount of preparation and precision and many times, it happens that these exams have many objections in the question paper. The impact of these objections causes a great degree of mental harassment to the exam takers.

To check the above hypothesis we should apply it  in one such exam as it will bring more clarity about the impact of such objections. So, let's stick to one such exam which is CLAT. CLAT is an annual entrance examination which is conducted by the consortium of NLUs every year on the first Sunday of December. In the latest edition CLAT 2024, which saw a surge in the no. of exam takers as more than 100,000 students appeared, was conducted on 3rd of December this year. And the consortium of NLUs released the final answer key on 9th December. In the official notification the consortium said that it had to withdraw two questions one from each English Language and Legal Reasoning and the answer of one question was changed. So, going by the honest and prudent logic, it is crystal clear that the failure on the part of the consortium had left a considerable impact on the aspirants.

To bring more clarity in the minds of exam takers we have analyzed the question papers of the past five years of CLAT, from 2020-2024.

 

Exam Year

Total Objections

No. of Questions whose answer is changed 

No. of questions withdrawn by consortium

CLAT 2024

3

1

2

CLAT 2023

1

0

1

CLAT 2022

3

3

0

CLAT 2021

5

4

1

CLAT 2020

3

0

3

Total 

15

8

7

                                                                                (Official Data; CLAT 2020-2024)

The above data clearly shows that these mistakes have marked their almighty presence in every year's CLAT examination. The most unfortunate thing about this problem is that students can not prepare themselves for these kinds of problems as these questions do not have a set pattern and removal of 1 question costs students heavily. Ranks of the candidates get affected a lot by removal of 1 question because candidates who are on the borderline suffer and sometimes it creates an unforeseen hurdle in the journey of a serious candidate. 

To understand this situation in a better way let’s take an example, suppose there is an Aspirant A who gave clat in 2020, and he scored 115.75 and he got a call from NLU-Jodhpur, but his target was to get admission in WBNUJS but the cutoff for the same was 117 so he missed his dream college by 1.25 Marks. To understand this situation we should pay more heed to the fact that in 2020 the consortium has withdrawn a total 3 questions and the final evaluation was done with three less questions in the paper. The impact of this withdrawal on the aspirations of the Candidate is huge and nobody is willing to take the responsibility of this negligence leaving candidates clueless post-examination. 

Few mistakes are better if avoided, and I would like to conclude my thoughts on the same line. Exam conducting authorities have no deficit of resources. The application cost of the CLAT is INR4000, making it one of the costliest entrance exams in the country. Expectations and stakes are so high that aspirants in general do not expect these mistakes in the paper. A proper scrutiny will help in resolving the problem. Consortium should work tirelessly in making the question paper foolproof. If mistakes can be identified after conducting an exam then the consortium should give it a proper inspection during the preparation of the draft of the question paper.