I debated a lot as to whether I should write on CLAT preference based law school ranking for this year. For past two years (2010 & 2009) I have tried to analyse the CLAT results and flesh out the ranking preference of the law school aspirant (who are/ought to be the intended beneficiary of all law school rankings), however this year the reasons for my doubt (about compiling a report on 2011 CLAT results) are the abundance of well written and well analysed articles in online legal news media like ‘Law becoming a primarychoice now’ and ‘CLAT 2011 Results’ by Rajneesh Singh, ‘Old-school CLAT prefswobble’ by Kian Ganz etc. These articles analyse every inch of the field and have provided a clear preference ranking among law schools: NLS, NALSAR, NUJS, (NLIU/NLUJ), GNLU, RMNLU, NUALS, RGNUL and CNLU.
So instead of providing my usual statistical analysis with average rank, rank width/dispersal, standard deviation etc. (but if you are interested in statistics check the articles by Kian or Rajneesh) I have decided to provide a visual representation of the CLAT preference in form of a heatmap. The 20x25 table represents the preference of the top 500 students who cleared CLAT in 2011 under the general category. Each university which have students in the top 500 have been provided with a particular shade to show how preferences vary in the set.
Click on the image for larger size
As is clear from the visual evidence NLS is still on top, NALSAR is second choice but has a serious dent with about a quarter who could be at NALSAR opting for NUJS, NUJS is undisputed third, there is tough tussle between NLIU and NLUJ (look at the intertwining of green and red in the middle half of the diagram), the bottom 1/3rd is dominated by GNLU which is followed by scattered presence of HNLU, RMNLU and NUALS (in that order).
