Yes, only eight days after the exam was announced on 3 September, following three writ petitions and a partial stay on results in the Supreme Court yesterday, plus a whole lot of last minute tweaks and some technology Snafus, the National Law Aptitude Test (NLAT) of NLSIU Bangalore is actually happening.
Following on from our wildly popular liveblog of the NLAT proceedings for the last two days, welcome to our NLAT live blog covering the proceedings for the Big Day, Saturday 12 September.
The first exam slot is to start at 12:30, the second slot is at 2:15pm and the last one at 4:00pm. Candidates are expected to be available and ready, 30 minutes before each, respectively.
115 technical support staff to be available on helplines
11:36: To kick off, some updates that were received late yesterday from NLS and that we included in our scoop about the simulated mock test, which had been billed as a “Simulation Test of the exact NLAT examination process” but turned out to be an unmitigated disaster and a bad omen for today.
However, according to a statement received from NLSIU late last night, it has sort of half-acknowledged that there were actual issues, though it has not really explained the cause or why this won’t happen again today in the actual test:
The simulation test was not a mandatory test. All students were given a chance to attend at least one simulation test. In the case of some students where they received late emails about their simulation test, they were given another chance to take the simulation test at 8 pm on Friday.
The helpline was active throughout the day on Friday. However, to assure students who may have concerns about accessing the helpline, staff of more than 115 will be available to man the helplines for technical assistance on Saturday when the NLAT 2020 will be conducted.
With regard to facial recognition issues, candidates have to comply with the instructions given to them in the candidate guide regarding the format of the ID card to be produced during the test.
In July we did an interview with the LSAT-India head Yusuf Abdul-Kareem, after they had just conducted their entrance test for 5,500.
When we asked him for any “potential advice or lessons learned for the CLAT and the AILET”, which were at that point to be held in July (with NLU Delhi’s AILET having briefly gone the home-proctored route before abandoning it), his second point was:
“The other advice I would give, is to make sure you have a robust customer service and troubleshooting support line and support system.”
While at the time he had declined to confirm exactly how many support staff they had on hand, let’s do some quick maths.
NLS has 27,500 candidates in three slots, working out to around 9,000 per slot. The LSAT had around 500 candidates per slot.
At 115 NLAT tech support workers, that works out to 78 students per staffer, per session.
If LSAT-India had used such a 1:78 ratio of helpline staff to candidate, it would have meant they would have had only six support staff available for each batch of 500, which would seem like a really low number if Abdul-Kareem strongly advised for “robust customer service and troubleshooting support line systems”.
By the accounts of some CLAT tutors we have spoken to, around 10 to 20% of candidates were not able to take the NLAT simulation at all yesterday due to technical issues, and “60 percent had at least some sort of problem, delay or test to at all conducted”.
If today’s actual exam will be as glitchy as the simulation, a 1:78 ratio of support staff is definitely not going to cut it, so here’s to hoping that most of those issues have been ironed out for today.
NLS ‘confident’ no cheaters would make it
11:54: As part oft our analysis of the real risk of cheating on the NLAT, we had asked the administration the following question: “Can you 100% guarantee that cheating will be impossible in the NLAT without getting caught?”
We have adopted robust technological measures and proctoring processes to maintain the integrity of the examination. We urge all candidates to take no risks with the proctoring and technological restrictions in place for the examination. Our integrity measures will come into full effect during and after the examination process as we review a comprehensive electronic record of the examination. While we cannot prevent a student’s attempt to circumvent these integrity measures, any evidence of examination malpractice will be taken extremely seriously and will result in disqualification.
We reassure all candidates appearing for NLAT 2020 to participate in the examination with full confidence. We are confident that no candidate who engages in examination malpractice will secure admission to the University.
However, as we had also pointed out in our article on cheating, the main saving grace of NLS might be that it only needs to confirm that the merit list top 80 candidates (or 120, petition pending) did not cheat, after the event.
That reduces the burden considerably but forensically, the only evidence they will have after the exam is over is potentially grainy 640×480 webcam footage and a potentially bad audio recording, both streamed over 512KBps (though we have not confirmed if those are actually being stored on servers for later examination, one would assume any half-way competent proctoring system to do so).
On top of that, they might have access to all keystrokes and possibly mouse movements of a candidate.
Let’s hope it’s enough.
FAQ updates today
There are several updates to the official NLSIU FAQs today, which are by now impossible to identify unless you run the FAQs through a text comparison engine (also known as a ‘redline’ in corporate lawyer speak) against previous versions.
Luckily, we have done that for you, so you don’t have to.
Some mobile phone help desk numbers have been removed.
12:10: Three helpdesk mobile phone numbers communicated previously have been removed from the site. Since there are now 115 staffers on hand (see above), that makes sense, since those three lines would have been jammed.
Instead the instructions now are:
If the helpdesk number is busy, candidates can call the technical assistance number communicated to them during the verification process and in case of internet failure. You may login to the admissions.nls.ac.in portal to access this technical assistance number.
The main helpdesk number is 080-471-89145, but again, that may be jammed so it may be safest to stick to their advice and use the number mentioned during verification.
So good advice would be to note down that number and get it into your phone, just in case you encounter problems so you don’t have to hunt for it.
Also slightly unclear: how are you going to access the admissions portal if you have “internet failure”?
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