How to ace Common-Law Admission Test Exam 2020

Common-Law Admission Test (CLAT) is a centralised test for admission into 21 national law universities and for other colleges that consider CLAT scores. For the first time, CLAT was conducted by National Law School of India University in the year 2008. CLAT is conducted for the undergraduate courses ie 5-year law degree and for Master of Laws (LLM).

In 2015 when Ram Manohar Lohia National Law University conducted CLAT they brought a major change and made it online. A few of the problems were students not able to locate their centers and the paper was much on unexpected lines. It brought the conducting of exam to the Supreme Court and various PIL's were filed. The same thing was repeated in the year 2016 when Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law made an easy paper and the cut off went too high. All these anomalies came into existence of CLAT consortium committee.

The CLAT consortium committee was established with the aim to improve the standard of legal education in the country. It was established on 19th August 2017 with its headquarters in NLSIU, Bengaluru and Prof. R. Venkata Rao, Vice-Chancellor as President and Prof. Faizan Mustafa, Vice-Chancellor, NALSAR, as Vice-President.

In the year 2018, the Supreme Court formed a CLAT secretariat at NLSIU to conduct the future CLAT exams. In the year 2019, the paper was much on expected lines and the CLAT cut off went 130-140. Although there were many questions that were repeated from the previous year's papers.

CLAT 2020

CLAT 2020 has witnessed major changes in its pattern. Things became clearer after the official notification was declared on 1st January, 2020. The paper will be conducted on a comprehensive pattern. The consortium stated in the official notification that comprehension based questions will be asked from 'Quantitative Techniques, English, Current Affairs, Legal Reasoning and Logical Reasoning'. Earlier the section was named as Legal Aptitude but now it has been changed to legal reasoning. We can say that prior legal knowledge is no more required. The set of rules or a comprehension will be given and on the basis of that the students will be required to answer those questions. The questions can be asked from any topic pertaining to legal. Students need to up to date themselves with the current topics in the news such as CAA, NRC, Ayodhya judgment, Sabrimala judgment, etc.

The English section in CLAT 2020 will be based on comprehensive passages with the view to test their understanding of the passages and inferences drawn from the passages. There will be no questions on vocabulary as the CLAT is not a memory-based paper now.

Mr. Amandeep Rajgotra says that instead of testing the arithmetic aptitude of candidates, the focus is now made on data interpretation skills of students. The logical reasoning section is going to play a major role now as the focus will be more on critical reasoning now. This section will include a variety of questions and will ask questions to test the deductive reasoning skills of students.

Tips

1. Read a newspaper daily (eg The Hindu) especially the editorial section. This habit will help you in solving comprehension and improving vocabulary.

2. Practice mock tests on a new pattern as much as you can.

3. Solve questions on logical reasoning in a larger ratio.

4. Read issue-based current affairs, rather than merely memorizing random facts.

5. Practice comprehension passages of varying difficulty levels.

6. Hold your nerves and keep your mind calm and prepare strategically.

(The author is National

Product Head-Law,

Pratham Test Prep)