As per an article authored by Deepak Kapoor, CEO and Founder of LawSkills, for the Indian Express, many questions that came into the DU entrance examination for LLB were barely related to the field. For instance, question number 37 asked, ‘What was the most common password in 2016 throughout the world?’
The previous Sunday, a mass of law aspirants gave the Delhi University LLB entrance exam. As a matter of fact, only a week ago did the university announced the changes in the entire pattern for the examination. This demands for the urgency to set up proper guidelines and instructions for conducting law entrance examinations with clear guidelines to even regulate the cases of erroneous questions and grace marks.
This year’s exam paper not only had questions irrelevant to the field of law, but many also were difficult enough that only a law student could answer them and not an aspirant, like question number 92 which required students to apply complex legal concepts such as ‘free consent’, ‘consideration’, ‘specific performance’, etc, that requires a detailed and in-depth understanding of the provisions of law, interpretation of statutory provisions, and even law of torts, to call some of them out.
A mismanagement of quality of exam paper like this grandly calls for a makeover for the process of conducting LL.B. entrance exams in India. One most persistent thought is to have a single entrance examination on a pan-India basis much like the engineering and medical entrance formats.
Also, there must a single independent body conducting and regulating these exams, like that of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) in the United States, as proposed by the Finance Minister, Arun Jaitely in his 2017-2018 Budget speech.
Also, to boost the turn-in of the candidates, there must be only one mode of examination- most preferably, online. A uniform pattern for the exam should be specified beforehand to make the exam homogeneous.
Prime Subject focus should be upon English, logical reasoning, analytical ability, general knowledge and current affairs, much like the LSATs.
As of yet, the entrance exam had been evaluating the candidates on legal aptitude including the social sciences, Indian constitution and political system and elementary mathematics, which does not hold much importance at this stage. This leads to the cropping of disadvantages for candidates from different streams.