Time Management and an Approach to CLAT by Vibhu Krishnatm Choubey (Class of 2023 – NALSAR)

Vibhu Krishnatm Choubey is a first year student of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad.

In this post, I seek to summarize my CLAT prep and how I approached it. Furthermore, please consider this as a piece of unsolicited advice and not something you should adhere to, in case it doesn’t suit you but hopefully, it will give you an insight into the pattern of the paper and the required techniques for preparation, so that you may find it easy to create an approach that works the best for you and do sincerely remember that everyone is different!

Part 1: Time Layout:

Do remember that the time distribution should suit your needs and it should depend on your core strength and weaknesses.

1: General Knowledge: Personally, it was my weakest topic and coming from an engineering college, I had no idea what to read and where to read from but consequently I developed my plan. Since my prep was for a duration of 2 months, I devoted maximum effort to this section. Time duration should be kept maximum till 10 mins but its great if you can do it within or around 5 mins,

Material: GK today monthly compendium, Pearsons’ General Knowledge (for static), Tanay Goyal: General Knowledge {preferred by me}, any one daily newspaper and mocks.

Please make sure to be thorough with what you read and revise it regularly. Don’t expand your GK sources, if you can’t keep up and remember what you read. The aforementioned materials if done properly can easily fetch you 35+ in this section alone. The approach for attempting is completely straightforward: either you know the answer or you don’t. YOU DON’T GUESS.

2: Legal reasoning: It was a tortuous subject. I wasn’t able to be consistent in it but after heavy practice from multiple sources, I found out that most of the questions that you will encounter in CLAT will either be the ones that you have already practiced before or the principle applied will be same and known to you but the facts will be different. Heavy practice is advised as only then can you fully unlock the secret of easily scoring above 40.

Materials: Wiley ExamXpert by Amandeep Rajgotra, Legal reasoning by A P Bharadwaj, coaching materials and Mocks.

Approach: You need to be fast and accurate. I will again stress on heavy practice and for legal theory, apart from the given books, take note of the latest judgments of the Supreme Court and prominent constitutional cases. Polity is just facts which can be easily learned.

3: English:  Basically marks on a platter. Should easily be completed; however, the Reading Comprehension part can give some time-related problems but nothing that can’t be solved by excessive practice. In case you are having problems in English, read the following materials and practice, practice, practice!

Vocabulary should be worked on every day. Make a notebook of all the complicated words you come across – be it mocks, newspaper or books.

Materials: Wren and martin (in case if you have shaky foundations), Norman Lewis: Word power made easy (the greatest book I have ever seen for building vocab), Mocks and Coaching Materials.

Approach: Should be fast. Leave the Reading Comprehension section if it’s taking too much of time but come back to it later! A good score is 30+.

4: Logical Reasoning: This topic was difficult for me only because the pattern of questions that came were unfamiliar. Puzzles used to take a lot of time but I devoted a lot of time to this topic and hence became comfortable with it despite not using books to practice. It was from class tests and mocks.

Materials: Logical reasoning: R.S Aggarwal, Mocks and Coaching Materials.

Approach: This section takes a lot of time if you get lost in it. First, attempt questions from sub-topics that you are comfortable with – in other words, attempt short and simple questions before moving on to slightly difficult questions. The time devoted to each puzzle should be a maximum of eight minutes.

5: Math:  The easiest topic for me, personally, since I had a math background. Come to speak of it, most of my peers hated math and I observed that this is true for most of the CLAT competitors.

Hence, do well in math because logically and technically, you would have improved what you scored by 1000 folds. Practice hard. I would suggest you leave topics such as probability and permutations & combinations after learning their basic formula since they are deep topics and not worth the effort as only 2 or 3 questions are asked collectively.

Materials: Quantitative Aptitude: R.S Aggarwal, Coaching Materials and Mocks.

A good score would be above 12 – however, above 15 would be great!

A Word on Mocks

Mocks are a very essential feature of preparation for CLAT. However, the method of attempting mocks should be honest, planned and strategic, based upon your strong or weak topics. I started giving 2 mocks a week with a gap of 3 days between each. After attempting one mock, I used to go through it again, in depth, to highlight my weak topics and spend the next two days perfecting them. Later, I started attempting 2 mocks per day after completing the syllabus and 4 mocks a day, complimenting them with sub-topics test.

Remember that revision is the name of the game!

I hope you found this article helpful and please ignore any mistakes that might have crept up. In case of any queries, please feel free to post them in the comments section below.

Please leave a comment below in case you have further queries; Vibhu will reply to them. In case you are desperately in need of a Personalised Action Plan, please read this.

If you’re looking to enroll to a test series, you might consider subscribing to the CLATGyan Test Series 2019.