CLAT was supposed to be conducted on the second Sunday of May but because of the Covid-19 pandemic the situation kept on worsening and date kept shifting and the current tentative date for CLAT is 22nd of August. Over the years the aspirants for CLAT have only increased and that has made the competition tougher than what it used to be. With less than 2 months remaining, CLAT 2020 is already knocking on the doors of the aspirants. It’s high time for one to put the pedal to the metal as last time over 60,000 students wrote CLAT to secure seats out of the total of 3000 in the National Law Universities and the number of students is only going to increase this year. Here are some preparation tips that will help the aspirants who have been preparing for CLAT diligently for a while and the ones who have just begun their preparation, both:
- Pay maximum attention to what is highly probable of being asked: Have a look at the previous years’ question papers. Though the pattern has changed a little, sections like General knowledge, English and Maths remain unchanged apart from the distribution of marks. For example, CLAT’s Maths section focuses highly on Arithmetic. It is advisable to practise arithmetic problems extensively and questions from sections like Trigonometry, Geometry and Modern Maths have almost been never asked in CLAT, so they can be skipped completely. This way, the efforts reduce to what is important and one can get an idea of what to expect in the actual CLAT. Similarly, General Knowledge section focuses more on Current affairs rather than Static General Knowledge, one can conveniently study the current affairs thoroughly as that constitutes nearly 80%-90% of the General Knowledge section. English section relies heavily on grammar and Reading comprehension, so one can conveniently focus on and practise these two concepts. Competitive exams are more about smart work than about hard work.
- Focus more on sections that provide an edge, like Maths and General Knowledge: Maths is a make or break section for most of the CLAT aspirants. A lot of aspirants fear negative marking in Math and choose to leave the entire section untouched. What is important to keep in mind here is, Maths constitutes 10% of the total CLAT paper. CLAT is an exam where even decimal points of marks matter and leaving sections like Maths is the biggest blunder students commit during taking CLAT. Similarly, some aspirants find General Knowledge too vague and avoid it altogether by focusing harder on other sections. General Knowledge is one-fourth of the entire CLAT paper, as we talked about earlier, mostly covers current affairs only. Any monthly magazine covering the events from previous CLAT to the current CLAT would suffice the syllabus of Current Affairs. Logical Reasoning is a section which partly logic and partly Maths. An aspirant with strong command over Maths would find it easier to tackle quant based logical reasoning than their competitor who chose to avoid Maths altogether. Other than quant based logical reasoning, blood relations, syllogism and verbal based logical reasoning questions are highly probable of being asked as they have been asked in CLAT regularly for some time now.
- Legal reasoning is the tie breaker: Legal reasoningdecides who goes up in the merit when two or more students score equal marks in CLAT. Students often misunderstand Legal reasoning as legal knowledge. CLAT consortium has decided to make a few changes in the pattern of the test and CLAT now aims to test the legal reasoning of students by giving them cases and options to choose from rather than testing their memory and asking them what they would ideally be learning after they get into a law school and questions based on legal maxims and legal awareness.
-Anmol Goswami
