Held for admissions in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes offered by National Law Universities, the Common-Law Admission Test Consortium of NLUs have restructured the exam pattern. The new model is shifting online; new test centers are going to be issued to candidates.

Clat is an aptitude-based exam which intends to gauge a candidate’s interest in law. Keeping this in mind, the Clat consortium has come up with a replacement pattern wherein they will be extensively testing the student’s reading and comprehending skills. Hence, the approach that was best fitted to the old pattern might not be an equivalent for Clat 2020. Clat comprises of five sections, namely English, current affairs, including public knowledge, legal reasoning, logical reasoning and quantitative techniques, each section requiring a special approach. However, one thing that stays uniform throughout the five sections is one’s reading and comprehension skills.

Section-wise strategy

It is recommended that one should develop a reading habit. Read editorials and newspapers daily and focus more on burning socio-legal issues among other things from reputed media houses. It’s recommended to make a depository of the important editorial articles from the last one year and undergo them thoroughly. It’ll definitely assist at this stage. Go through sample papers, previous year papers, and analyse the sort of questions that are asked in these exams. Though there’s a replacement pattern this year, the previous year’s question papers will still help to form a solid concept. This has also been reiterated by the CLAT consortium in their notifications/ tweets.

General awareness and current affairs

The questions on current affairs are going to be asked in passage format. There’ll be a series of questions from art and culture, world affairs and current affairs. The sole success mantra is to be regular with the present affairs. For current affairs one may resort to the editorial sections of the newspapers. The pattern released by the consortium has stressed that majority of the question paper would be interpretative in nature. To improve speed one may take as many mock tests as required. This is necessary to increase complete concentration for two hours where one would like to interpret on the way while reading.

Legal aptitude

This section is most important. It will be a 50 marks paper with each question carrying one mark. The two part question paper will include legal knowledge and legal reasoning. To ace the legal knowledge section, they must master the common legal terminologies. Candidates must have an awareness regarding the recent happenings in legal sector.

Elementary mathematics

Mathematics can be unnerving for many but having a grasp on the basics can solve most of the questions from this section. Reading based questions in mathematics can get a bit hard to crack; hence it should be given extra attention besides solving quantitative aptitude questions. The section will include short sets of facts, graphs or other diagrammatic representations, alongside data interpretation including topics from ratio proportion, average, percentage, profit and loss and mixture allegations. To get a thorough understanding of the concepts, it is vital to solve at least 20-25 questions in a daily basis.

Logical reasoning

Being one among the foremost unpredictable sections, it contains around 9 to 10 passages with total 30 questions from it. For this section, one simply needs to emphasise on critical reasoning and sophisticated arrangement or puzzles. Critical reasoning in itself is a vast topic. It demands an honest comprehension and important thinking ability. Questions like assumptions, strengthening, and weakening arguments, conclusions, etc are going to be covered during this topic.

English language

This section mostly has questions that test one’s reading skills. As per sample papers released by the consortium, there’ll be around 30 questions in this section. This will include six passages (with four or five multiple choice questions), which will test comprehension ability. One may work on reading speed and grammar to excel. It is also necessary to work on one’s vocabulary. Any book with an ample number of Reading Comprehensions will do the trick.

One must identify one’s strong and weak areas on basis of scoring ability. This can be figured out by solving as many sample papers as possible. Once identified, allocate longer time to the weak areas. The writer is national product head, law, Pratham Test Prep