Clat Exam

CLAT 2020

The Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) is a national level entrance exam for admissions to candidates in undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate (PG) law courses offered at NLUs and other colleges/ universities accepting exam scores.

CLAT is conducted every year to select students for 22 National Law Universities in India, other than National Law University-Delhi, which has their own process to select the students. The exam is tentatively scheduled to be held in the second week of May. The exam is held for admissions in UG and PG programs offered by the National Law Universities.

Till 2018, the exam was conducted by NLUs on a rotational basis. However, from 2019 onwards it is being conducted by a permanent body formed by the universities i.e. The Consortium of NLUs. The consortium has it’s headquarter at NLSIU Bangalore and comprises:

• An Executive Committee
• The CLAT Convenor of the current year (NUSRL, Ranchi, for CLAT 2020)
• The CLAT Convenor of the following year
• Two co-opted Vice-Chancellors of NLUs

CLAT Training in Hyderabad

For CLAT Training, BRAINWIZ is the Best CLAT Training institute in Hyderabad. Here, training covers the complete Logical Reasoning and Verbal Ability sections of CLAT 2020 updated syllabus. Training will be with complete tricks and shortcuts which makes an easy way for the students to get a good score in the CLAT Entrance exams. Thousands of students from PAN India came to BRAINWIZ and got Trained on these modules and secured an high score in CLAT and got a chance for integrated courses of LLB as well as LLM courses. This makes BRAINWIZ to be the leading institute for CLAT Training in Ameerpet, Hyderabad.

CLAT EXAM 2020 Eligibility criteria, Exam Pattern and Syllabus are mentioning in detail below.

CLAT Eligibility Criteria 2020

To appear for CLAT exam, candidates need to fulfil the eligibility criteria as under:

CLAT Eligibility for five-year integrated courses:

• Candidates who have completed 10+2 or equivalent examination for national or state board of education.
• They should have obtained minimum 45% marks if belonging to General/ Other Backward Class (OBC) / Specially-abled categories and, 40% marks if belonging to Scheduled Class (SC) / Scheduled Tribe (ST) categories.
• Candidates can apply for CLAT 2020 irrespective of their age as the age limit criteria have been removed by BCI.

CLAT Eligibility for LLM Course:

• Candidates should have completed their graduation with at least 55% marks if belonging to General/ Other Backward Class (OBC)/ specially abled person categories and at least 50% marks if belonging to Scheduled Class (SC)/ Scheduled Tribe (ST) categories.
• Candidates can apply for CLAT 2020 even if they are in the final year of their graduation degree. However, they should submit the proof of qualifying the final examination and completing graduation degree at the time of admission formalities.
• There is no upper age limit to apply for CLAT 2020 exam.

CLAT Process

Candidates seeking admissions to NLUs or law schools accepting CLAT scores have to follow the process as under:

Stage I

APPLY ONLINE: Candidates have to apply online on the official website of CLAT consortium.

Stage II

DOWNLOAD ADMIT CARD: The Consortium will issue the admit cards to all applicants for appearing in the exam.

Stage III

APPEAR FOR EXAM: Candidates have to appear at the allotted test centres to take the exam.

Stage IV

DECLARATION OF RESULTS: CLAT Consortium will declare the results on the official website in the form of Merit lists.

Stage V

ADMISSION PROCESS: The Shortlisted candidates have to participate in the counselling rounds of NLUs as per the schedule.

CLAT 2020 Exam Highlights

CLAT 2020 Sectional Weightage

The consortium will release detailed exam pattern of CLAT 2020 in the last week of December 2019, however, as per the press release, it is expected that 'Legal Aptitude' section will be removed from the question paper. Also, the total number of questions will be 120-150 only. Refer the table below for the speculated sectional- weightage of CLAT 2020 paper:

CLAT 2020 Marking Scheme

Unlike the exam pattern. The marking scheme of CLAT will remain the same as earlier, i.e.

• For every correct answer, candidates are awarded one mark.
• However, for every wrong attempt, 0.25 marks are deducted from their total score.
• No marks will be awarded or deducted for questions not attempted.

CLAT 2020 New Pattern

In its 13th edition of CLAT, the consortium in a press conference held on 21st November, 2019 announced some major changes in the CLAT 2020 paper pattern. The changes are brought in with the view to improve the quality of students entering the National Law Universities.

CLAT 2020 will be held on 10th May, 2020. The consortium maintains that the 13th edition of Common Law Admission Test (CLAT) would be held in the usual manner, i.e. 2nd Sunday of May, 2020.

CLAT 2020 will be offline. With respect to the mode of examination, the exam would be in the offline mode, same as 2019. Following the number of issues and problems with conducting the exam in online mode, CLAT 2019 was held in offline mode and the same would be continuing for CLAT 2020 as well.

Reduction in the number of questions from 200 to 120-150 – As stated by Prof. Faizan Mustafa (who has been heading the NLU Consortium as its President), “asking students to answer 200 questions in 120 minutes is not right as it puts students under lot of mental stress. Therefore there will be a reduction in the number of questions from 200 to 120-150. The exact number of questions is however unknown at this time.

Comprehension based Questions – The consortium has informed that comprehension based questions will be asked from Quantitative Techniques, English, Current Affairs, Deductive Reasoning and Logical Reasoning.

Static GK – No questions from the static GK portion will be asked. Questions, only from the current affairs section will be asked and for this, the students only need to read newspapers.

No Legal GK – CLAT is no more a test of memory. It is a test of aptitude and for this very reason, there won’t be any questions from Legal Knowledge. Earlier also there have been papers with zero questions from the Legal Knowledge section. Example – 2018 CLAT paper. A similar pattern is expected in 2020 as well.

Data Interpretation – Hard-core mathematics questions like Time and Work will not be asked. Instead, students will be tested on Data Interpretation questions. Maths, already known as the big bad of CLAT could now be one of the easiest section of CLAT.

Deductive Reasoning – There has been a huge buzz amongst the students as to what is deductive reasoning? Will there be any legal section in CLAT or not? Just to clarify to all such students, the legal reasoning section i.e. the principle-fact based questions is basically your deductive reasoning. The only change is, no prior legal knowledge is required. There will be a legal section, but that too would be in the form of reasoning based questions. As stated by Prof. Faizan Mustafa, it is the job of NLUs to teach law. Students taking admissions in NLUs could not be expected to know the law.

No Vocabulary – As stated earlier, since CLAT is no more a test of memory, there won’t be any direct questions pertaining to vocabulary, synonyms etc.

All of the above mentioned changes have been brought in with a view to improve the quality of students entering the National Law Universities. As stated by Prof. Faizan Mustafa, “The idea is to get better students to National Law Universities who have competence in reading texts and demonstrate skills in inferential reasoning.?

Section Wise Syllabus

Verbal Ability

• 1. Vocabulary
• 2. Sentence Correction
• 3. Reading Comprehension
• 4. Fill in the blanks
• 5. Jumbled Sentences
• 6. Closed Paragraph
• 7. Summary Questions
• 8. Analogies & Reverse Analogies

Logical Reasoning

• 1. Number series
• 2. Letter series
• 3. Calendars
• 4. Clocks
• 5. Cubes
• 6. Seating Arrangement
• 7. Deductions & Syllogisms
• 8. Blood Relations
• 9. Logical Connectives
• 10. Logical Sequence
• 11. Logical Matching

General Awareness

In this section, candidates are evaluated on the basis of their general awareness including static general knowledge. Current affair questions test a candidate’s knowledge about the events happening nationally as well as internationally. To prepare for this section, candidates are advised to be up-to-date with news and other topics discussed in mainstream media from March 2019 to April 2020.

Mathematics

In this section, candidate’s knowledge on elementary mathematics, that is, Maths taught up to Class X is tested.

Legal Aptitude

In this section, a candidate’s interest in the field of law, research aptitude as well as problem-solving abilities is tested.