New Delhi: The Common Law Admission test (CLAT) - 2011 that was conducted on Sunday, May 15, ended up surprising many law aspirants after they found that the question paper pattern had been subjected to many revisions that the students were not aware of.

A student who appeared for the test, Sonakshi Chaudhry, said that the question paper given for the test that was conducted on Sunday was much longer than what the previous years' question papers had been or even the sample papers.

"Even the section on legal reasoning was very time consuming and had very lengthy case dockets. I ended up missing about 25 questions because of that," she said.

Dhrupad Bharadwaj, another aspirant said that the English section of the question paper had five passages instead of just one, which left most students with less time to complete the whole question paper.

The test had been administered this year by the National University of Juridical Sciences (NUJS) in Kolkata. Authorities at the university said that the announcements regarding the changes that were made to the paper this year had been informed well in advance.

MK Singh, Convenor of the CLAT exam, said that the changes made in the question paper had been announced well in advance a long time back. "We might have been wrong in calculating the time and length of the question paper but the changes were made to put all aspirants on an equal footing," he said.

Most aspirants were confused by the legal section in the paper along with the mathematics and verbal sections. Only the logical reasoning section provided some relief to students hassled by the paper.

M.K. Singh further defended the decision to change the paper and said that they wanted only the best candidates to take up careers in law. "There are students who consider law as a secondary option and also those who come from lawyer families so choose the same career. These changes were introduced to make the system fairer to all students," he said.