Common Law Admission Test

What it is for

CLAT is the common entrance test for admission to the National Law Universities, and its score is also accepted by a number of other law schools. Separate papers exist for undergraduate and postgraduate admission.

Conducted by Consortium of National Law Universities.

How it is structured

1. The test

   A comprehension-led paper covering English, current affairs and general knowledge, legal reasoning, logical reasoning and quantitative techniques. Most sections are built around passages, so reading speed and accuracy affect every part of the paper.

2. Counselling and seat allocation

   Seats across participating universities are allocated centrally on the basis of rank and stated preferences.

Who it is for

School leavers for the undergraduate programme and law graduates for the postgraduate one. Eligibility, minimum marks and category criteria are set by the Consortium and revised periodically — take them from the official source.

What preparation involves

Preparation typically runs over a year alongside school. The legal reasoning section deliberately does not require prior knowledge of law: it supplies a principle and tests whether you can apply it to facts strictly, without importing what you assume the law ought to be. That discipline is the core skill and is best built by practising with passages rather than by reading legal material. Sustained newspaper reading does more for this exam than for most.

The section that surprises candidates is legal reasoning, because knowing about law does not help and can actively mislead. The task is to apply the stated principle to the given facts even when the result feels wrong — reasoning from the passage, not from intuition or from what you have read elsewhere.

Because the paper is comprehension-heavy throughout, improving reading speed without losing accuracy raises your score across every section at once, which makes it the highest-leverage thing to work on first.