The largest-ever law school exam that decides admission to nearly a dozen national schools across India will turn disabled-friendly this summer.

Additional time to crack the two-hour exam, option of bringing one's own scribes along with instruments for problem-solving and a question paper sans any visual reasoning to aid the blind are some of the key features of the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) policy of candidates with disabilities to be implemented from this year.

The West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS), Kolkata which is organising the fourth edition of CLAT, will allow disabled candidates who are hearing/vision impaired to bring their own scribes or have the CLAT committee pick a scribe for them. The scribe must be one educational class junior to the candidate and must also not be someone pursuing a law degree. The scribe will also give a declaration stating that he/she will not in any way help the disabled candidate answer any question in the paper, apart from the regular duty of reading out the paper and pencilling the correct answer.

"Thus far, there has been no consistent CLAT policy on the issue of scribes. While some CLAT-conducting law schools permitted candidates to bring their own scribes, others did not. We, therefore, decided that we must adopt a detailed policy that would aim to balance the concerns of disabled candidates as well as to ensure a fair conduct of the CLAT examination. Also, we realised that it was important to grant disabled candidates the option of bringing their own scribes. Often times, it so happens that externally provided scribes do not work well with the disabled candidate, and this has a detrimental impact on their examination," MP Singh, CLAT 2011 convenor, told TOI.

Disabled candidates taking the May 15 exam will get 40 additional minutes to complete the under-graduate entrance test and 60 minutes for the post-graduate test.

The question paper itself is being given a makeover to make it friendly for the differently-abled. "We've decided that we will not have any "visual reasoning" questions in the "logical reasoning" section, since this unfairly prejudices visually impaired candidates who are not able to see the visuals in the question. We've also decided to permit them to bring their own instruments for helping with sections such as maths, which might require the use of Taylor Frames, for visually impaired candidates," said Shamnad Basheer, professor at WBNUJS and part of the CLAT committee.