CLAT (Common Law Admission Test)
When does a lawyer speak the truth? When he doesn’t open his mouth. Lawyer jokes run galore but imagine a nation without good lawyers. There are 3 million cases held up in litigation in our country – unlaid roads, incomplete projects, unfinished bridges, scores of people held in jail for many years for a sentence which would be for a maximum of a year.
Innocent and gullible people mulct out of their miniscule possessions and multitude of people waiting for their claims to be settled.
How could a nation chug along when its very own people are choked in the legal system?
Rightly said – justice delayed is justice denied. The best of brains have to
work together to pull this country out of the morass.
Now the next question that arises is how do you define the best brains.
Listed are the qualities that are a requisite to bring out the best legal professionals in the country:
1. Integrity
2. Well-read people with diverse reading skills
3. Persons with acumen in current affairs and a depth of knowledge in
each area ranging from politics, literature, science, arts, law, business
and sports.
4. Persons with discernment and excellent critical reasoning skills
5. Minds trained at extrapolating data.
CLAT had been the bedrock of the bedrock of the best lawyers in the country but its selection process till recently was under question. Its standards in English had been below power and even students with the modicum of English knowledge could breeze through. The new CLAT would have none of these. All elementary stuff like filling in the blanks, basic grammar, punctuation which would never bring out the very best in the system would be now thrown out of the window. The entire section of 30 questions would comprise only of reading comprehension of a higher order. This bold approach would ascertain that students with the best of reading skills would see the light of the day.
Earlier the only qualification to clear the GK was to have the ability to cram. This trend persists even today in UPSC & TNPSC exams. Students have to go through various websites cramming the information and regurgitate in the
examination. The best regurgitator could proclaim to have the very best GK. Not so any longer.
The CLAT board has taken a novel approach. Coaching centers will have to work not only in width but also in depth. Example – Donald Trump’s impeachment would draw parallels and questions like who was the earlier President to be impeached, article that talks about the impeachment of the Indian President, the country that was the cause of Trump’s impeachment could all be asked for. So the student would have no other alternative but to read each news article in depth.
Newspapers are back again – the empire strikes back.
More news in-store – Legal Reasoning had been a mundane affair with cliché passages and repeated questions which students could breeze past if they were ready to go through the rigmarole. No longer do the students have to memorize articles, CPCs and IPCs – instead CLAT has taken the GMAT route. Critical Reasoning is in.
Are CLAT Coaching Centers listening? Students now have to sharpen their minds on arguments, assumptions, inference, logical flaws and analogous reasoning. The argument is clearly written on the wall and the verdict is out.
A good reader becomes excellent at critical reasoning which ultimately makes her / him a brilliant decision maker.
Students have to be grounded on moral philosophy and legal and public policy. Even logical reasoning could need the application of hardcore analysis and logic.
The final brilliant move which would help some and be the unkindest cut of all for many is the quantitative section. Simple percentage and calculations are now done and dusted. Students have to run through caselets and discern the forest for the trees and translate the data into meaningful information.
I believe that never before had any examination in India has taken such an orthogonal shift. No more of shortcuts or cheap coaching factories. The students will now have to burn the mid-night oil and hone their mental faculties with the sharpest of minds and thus herald India into an illustrious future.
Here are some resources that will help you in your CLAT Exam Coaching:
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