CLAT 2020 | General Knowledge

General Knowledge | Previous Year Questions

CLAT General Knowledge

CCLAT Current Affairs and General Knowledge section tests the depth of understanding in a range of topics. Candidates are expected to read a particular news or opinion piece in-depth. Reading at-least one newspaper every day is necessary. News, events and happenings pertaining to legal issues are particularly important when it comes to CLAT Current Affairs and General Knowledge section.

The following passages and questions have been framed with an eye on the latest samples from the Consortium of NLUs. More importantly, they are pegged exactly at the level of difficulty of CLAT.

How much of a walking Encyclopedia are you? How knowledgeable are you with the current happenings? Try the following questions, available for free!

CLAT 2020 General Knowledge: National Education Policy

One thing struck us as a major difference between the new National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and its predecessor. The earlier national policies on education (NPE) from 1986 and 1992 presented themselves as attempts to consolidate and build on earlier efforts, particularly the NPE, 1968. The new NEP 2020 policy, on the other hand, is very keen to establish that it is different from everything in the past, including in its name. Nowhere does this attitude come across as starkly as it does in the section on higher education.

It comes across fairly clearly on how the higher education ecosystem will be by 2040. By this time — if the policy has its way — the Indian higher education ecosystem will be populated with higher education institutions (HEI). These will comprise Universities and Colleges and the public and private sectors, all of which will be 'multi-disciplinary', with each populated by more than 3,000 students, with at least one "in or near every district". Universities will conduct research and post-graduate and under-graduate teaching, some research-intensive and others teaching-intensive. Colleges will largely teach at the under-graduate level, with a number of them having their medium of instruction in either bilingual or local / Indian languages. The colleges can manifest in clusters around universities as constituent colleges or may be standalone autonomous ones. Ideally, all HEIs will eventually become "independent self-governing institutions" with considerable "faculty and institutional autonomy". They will have complied with a series of regulatory exercises that are "light-but-tight" and will be operated by a large number of private accreditors, overseen by a new set of regulatory institutions at the national level.

Source: Excerpt taken from downtoearth.org.in, written by Nitin Mehta & Gagan Mehta. (Dated 14th August, 2020)

Which of the following is proposed as a change in the structure of institutions responsible for affiliation and accreditation under the NEP 2020?

  1. Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) will be set up as a single umbrella body for the entire higher education.
  2. University Grant Commission to be renamed as AICTE.
  3. National Affiliation and Accreditation Council to be renamed as National Standard Council of India.
  4. National Council for Education Research and Teaching to be renamed as BCERT.

Explanatory Answer

Higher Education Commission of India will be the umbrella organization under which UGC, AICTE and other professional bodies will be integrated. This was also a reform effort independent of the NEP.

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