Ranking National Law Schools as per CLAT rank of admitted students

Over the last few years there has been a growing trend among the popular press in India to rank the Law Schools. The rankings are usually given by India Today, Outlook (registration required) and recently Mint, Halsbury etc.

Together they employ a variety of methodology to come up with the rankings ranging from perceptual study to combining various factors like pedagogic systems, placements etc.

But surprisingly all of them leave out what the students want or the students perception of a law school (although some include perceptual scores they are mostly from the professional backgrounds like recruiters, lawyers etc.), hence the actual perception of the law students are never reflected. In USA ranking of law schools takes into account average academic grades of accepted students including GPA and LSAT scores in India this can be replaced by analyzing the preference of successful CLAT candidates for their law schools.

In 2009, the students appearing for CLAT were asked to mention the order in which they are to be admitted into law schools as per their rank. Thus they were to mark the law schools in order as per their preference. Based on the data as provided in the CLAT website we can determine the CLAT score of a participating law school by analysing the CLAT ranks of students admitted in such law school.

At the very outset let us discuss what are the shortcomings of this study, it tries to find out the ranking of the university based on the CLAT ranks of the students who got into that university, but the top ranker of CLAT may not be the best law student of the country, thus CLAT ranks is just one component whereby law schools maybe ranked. Also the study takes into account the ranks of general candidates (including state general qouta) as data in this area are more stable and there is less variation. It also discusses only the UG CLAT perception, therefore only the institutions taking part in the UG CLAT process be ranked.

Click on the graph above to enlarge (opens in same tab)

The graph above takes into consideration both average CLAT rank of the entrants (red line) to the law school and to allay the fears of those law schools who take in a large number of students the study also employs median rank (blue line), however understandably the less the difference between the average and median the more homogeneous the class is.

The Law School ranking on the basis of CLAT scores has NLS, NALSAR, NUJS, NLIU - B and NLU - J occupying the top five slots in the average and the median ranks. However after that the average CLAT rank favors NUALS, RMNLU, GNLU, CNLU, RGNLU and HNLU (in that order), while the median CLAT rank favors HNLU, GNLU, RMNLU, RGNLU, and CNLU (in that order). As has been hypothised earlier the branch in the rank list after the top five may be becasue of the high intake (of target group of this study) in colleges likeGNLU, HNLU etc.

Click on the table above to enlarge (opens in same tab)

Now if we compare the CLAT scores with the ranking by popular press (as done in the table above) we find that the relative ranking of the law schools taking students through CLAT is more or less similar to the finding in this piece. The notable differences are:

• India Today ranks NUJS below NLIU - B and NLU - J.
• Outlook ranks NLU - J over NLIU - B and NUJS over NALSAR.
• Mint also ranks NLU - J over NLIU - B.

Unfortunately most other law schools taking students through CLAT (GNLU, HNLU etc.) did not merit a mention in any of the popular law school ranking except for NUALS which managed 19th position as per the India Today rankings.
As has already mentioned at the beginning CLAT scores are not the sole determining criteria in ranking law schools other factors like faculty quality, contributions to journals, scholarly work produced by faculty and students, moot court participations in India and abroad, internship programs, support of alumni network etc. also need to be taken into account. However after saying so we must realise that CLAT scores of a university goes a long way in determining the projected future quality of students and thereby affecting the overall worth of a university and thus any law school rankings by popular press should take into account the CLAT rank factor in its methodology to provide a clearer picture.