National Law University – Orissa Anaylsis

A season of disappointing law school entrances came to an end with NLUO’s entrance, and unlike all the others, this was a paper that somehow lived up to its reputation of being a paper of sustained quality. In the last two years, the paper has had one drawback – which is, that it is a lengthy paper, and a paper of a level of difficulty that borders on ‘impossibility’, however, this time, that one problem was rectified.

The paper broadly follows the same pattern as CLAT, with 200 marks for 200 questions. From the reviews that we’ve got from students, most of them were satisfied on both counts: quality and length.

Legal Reasoning

There were 15 standard legal reasoning questions, of reasonable length and moderate to easy difficulty. The section also consisted of, interestingly, exercises of Legal Assertion and Reasoning – this tested students on understanding of basic law, reasoning and also basic legal knowledge.

There were also a lot of Legal GK questions, and a few that CG has decided to classify as “Legal Understanding” questions pertaining to fraud/misrepresentation, standing up during the national anthem, etc – and you had to conclude accordingly what the answer could be.

Serving three of the most important purposes (testing knowledge, reasoning and understanding capabilities), without wasting the student’s time – this section should get full marks for presence of mind and creativity.

General Knowledge

NLU-O has never had a reputation with respect to General Knowledge, the papers have always tested the students on knowledge of the mundane and irrelevant. While there were a lot of relevant Current Affairs (mostly drawn from 2011) there were a lot more of irrelevant questions, and surprisingly, A LOT of Static General Knowledge. And in my opinion, most of it was terribly misplaced (China’s plan to link Tibet to a certain city, evolution of species, really?) However, over all the difficulty level was a notch lower than the previous papers, but still, students who’d kept CLAT in mind and prepared, would’ve had problems.

English

More than just satisfactory, in smaller sub-sections, this part of the paper tested the students on almost everything – from routine stuff (reading comprehensions, sentence correction, appropriate words, Contextual vocabulary paraphrasing, similar pairs, odd word out) to something very, very interesting where we’d to choose the “most appropriate summary”. Anyone with a good reasoning capability and basic knowledge of the language could have easily aced it. Again, questions were of a very good quality and nothing unreasonable turned up.

Logical Reasoning

Logical Reasoning was completely dominated by Analytical Reasoning. However, the ‘CR’ aspect was pretty well, balanced by the English section as well as the residue of the reasoning questions.

Math

Was the most difficult of the set, evidently. Had a few data interpretation questions, mixtures, and the like. Looks like NLU-O fell in love with Analytical Reasoning this summer, with the subject dominating, both reasoning and the Mathematics section.

Final Comments

Overall the paper was a breeze in this summer of terrible Law Entrances. However, this is psychology playing in our heads, since the others were either too easy, lengthy or unreasonable – this looked much better. Objectively speaking, this was a good paper only in parts, the GK being very disappointing. The paper needs to move away from its paradigm of assuming that irrelevant questions could naturally be equated to a higher level of difficulty.

However, introducing newer exercises and reasonably balancing difficulty was a very good decision. Another good aspect was the fact that this paper was thematically coherent and uniform – in the sense that certain essentials of a students’ aptitude were recognized and they were sought to be tested throughout the paper, viz. understanding and reasoning capabilities.

This paper is exactly what law entrances should be (with a major exception being GK) – a test of aptitude, a test to know whether you have it in you to be a lawyer or not. Coaching or no coaching you’d have done well if you had the stuff.

All the best!
Signing Off for the last time!
Aymen Mohammed.
CG

For the GK questions asked in the paper, click here