Almost 26,000 law aspirants took CLAT 2012 (Common Law Admission Test) on 13th May 2012. The national level law entrance which is the key to gaining admission to 14 prestigious law schools in the country drew mixed reactions from the candidates.

Some students found the paper simple whereas many others claimed that the exam pattern had deviated from what was notified on the CLAT official website (www.clat.ac.in).


The Mathematics & the English section were quite easy, but the deviation from the notified pattern made the General Knowledge & Legal Aptitude section tricky for most students.


For instance, the CLAT website categorically states that the General Knowledge section would “only test students on their knowledge of current affairs (broadly defined as matters featured in mainstream media between March 2011 and March 2012).” However, the GK section of CLAT 2012 (worth 50 marks) contained 22-25 questions on static GK and the rest on current affairs.

(Read: How to prepare for CLAT)

One of the GK questions was on the French Revolution (that took place in the 18th century). A frustrated student, Kruthika Ns has expressed her ire on the Facebook page of CLAThacker (a website for CLAT aspirants) stating, “I'm confused, was the French revolution somewhere between 2011-2012?” (sic). Another law aspirant, Prabhat, posted, ““Man is a social animal” – Which thinker said this? Seems like a legit question? Yes. The answer is Aristotle who died in 322 BC. Aristotle could not have said that between March 2011 and March 2012!”.


The Legal Aptitude section too, threw the candidates into a tizzy. The official CLAT notification had clearly stated that students would not be tested on any prior knowledge of law or legal concepts. If a technical/legal term is used in the question, that term will be explained in the question itself. The questions will be designed to test your legal “reasoning”, not legal “knowledge”. Instead, there were 25-27 questions based on legal knowledge out of which 10 were of Reason-Assertion type.


Rajneesh Singh, national product manager for law at IMS Learning Resources Pvt Ltd who is a very popular CLAT mentor, posted on the CLAThacker page on Facebook, “STATICness continues and that too after they announced at clat.ac.in that no legal knowledge and no static. PIL going to be filed against CLAT. Some people are going to do so. The case is very strong. The mismatch of clat.ac.in info and the CLAT 2012 paper will be enough to get them sued HARD”. (sic)


CLAT 2012 results are expected to be announced on 28th May 2012.

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LL.B & LL.M Entrance Test 2012: Faculty of Law, Delhi University

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