CLATCommon Law Admission Test (UG and PG)

CLAT is India's premier law entrance examination, introduced in 2008 to replace the separate entrance tests each National Law University previously held. Since 2019 it has been conducted by the Consortium of National Law Universities (established 2017), and it remains a pen-and-paper test held once a year. The UG paper admits candidates to five-year integrated programmes (BA LLB, BBA LLB, B.Com LLB, B.Sc LLB and similar) at 26 NLUs; the PG paper governs LLM admissions at the NLUs and is also used by public-sector undertakings in recruiting law officers.

The UG exam is deliberately aptitude-focused rather than knowledge-heavy: since the 2020 reform, all five sections are built around passages of roughly 450 words followed by question sets, testing comprehension, reasoning and application rather than rote memorisation. Legal Reasoning — the most heavily weighted section along with Current Affairs — states the legal principle within the passage, so prior legal study is not required. Scoring is +1 per correct answer with a 0.25-mark deduction per error, and competition is intense: well over 70,000 candidates typically contest roughly 3,000-plus NLU UG seats, so only a small percentage secure top-NLU admission.

CLAT PG follows the same two-hour, 120-question, negatively marked format, but draws its passages from landmark judgments, statutes and regulations, with constitutional law and jurisprudence carrying the greatest weight. Counselling for both papers runs through the Consortium's centralised online admission process, where candidates rank NLU preferences and seats are allotted across multiple rounds. Aspirants should rely exclusively on consortiumofnlus.ac.in for notifications, as the exam calendar and pattern details are announced there each cycle.