The report has now been made available for public feedback until August 31. The five-member panel — comprising professors Tarunabh Khaitan (LSE), Dev Saif Gangjee (Oxford), Shyamkrishna Balganesh (Columbia), Pritam Baruah (BML Munjal University) and Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge) — was set up last year by the advisory board of the Consortium chaired by former Supreme Court judge Justice Indu Malhotra. The committee was set up months after the apex court criticised the “callous and casual manner” in which the Consortium had been framing CLAT questions.

The NLU Consortium has also sought the Office of the Chief Justice of India to constitute a committee to further examine the expert committee recommendations.

What the committee wants changed

The report found that English and legal reasoning answers in CLAT often lie “verbatim within the passage,” reducing the exam to “textual matching” rather than interpretation. The GK section, it said, swings between “trivial factual recall” and questions that rely on “obscure facts… that privilege rote learning over analytical understanding.”

For undergraduates, the committee has proposed a leaner three-section model:

The GK/current affairs section scrapped entirely.

English reworked into a language and comprehension section testing functional literacy.

Legal and logical reasoning merged into a single aptitude section.

Each section capped at 10–15 questions, within the same two-hour duration, to reduce the “premium on speed.”

A new subjective essay component to test communication and argument.

The expert panel also raised questions over testing first-year legal concepts on students who haven’t yet studied law, noting this “benefits coaching centres more than law schools.”

For the postgraduate exam, the panel called the current uniform syllabus unfair to those pursuing specialised LLMs, and proposed retaining the UG-style sections for half the weightage, adding a legal-developments section restricted to the past two years, and introducing a subjective “problem question.”

The report also recommended an overhaul of how the CLAT is administered. Currently, the responsibility of conducting the exam rotates annually among the vice-chancellors of member universities. The committee noted that this rotating convenorship model prevents the development of “institutional memory”. To fix this, the panel recommended professionalising the paper-setting process by hiring external testing experts or developing a dedicated internal team to ensure quality control and avoid recurring litigation over erroneous answer keys.