CLAT 2024 Analysis

CLAT 2024 was conducted today by the CLAT consortium across the country in the paper & pencil mode. The paper, as announced by the consortium, had 120 questions.

The pattern and the difficulty level, based on feedback from students, is as below.

Section	No. of Questions	Difficulty Level
English Language	24	Easy-Moderate
Current Affairs including GK	28	Easy-Moderate
Legal Reasoning	32	Easy-Moderate
Logical Reasoning	24	Moderate
Quantitative Techniques	12	Moderate
Total	120	Moderate

The level of difficulty was perceived to be slightly on the lower side by the students, compared to that of last year. However, there were many surprises thrown at them in the test in terms of the types of questions asked. But interestingly, this doesn’t seem to have pushed the level of difficulty up, overall.

Distribution of Questions per passage was not unform, unlike last year. Passages had 4-7 questions. The approach required was slightly different for the GK section, given the nature of the questions this year, compared to the approach needed for the previous CLAT papers.

Difficulty level was unanimously found to be easy to moderate in most of the sections and it could be easily completed in the allotted time by a good number of students. That the number of questions came down did contribute to this unhurried completion of the sections.

Let us look at the section-wise analysis to understand this better.

English Language

The English Language section of CLAT 2024 had four passages with 6 questions in each passage. The first passage was on English Literature. It had all direct, specific detail questions.

Passage II was an excerpt from ‘Fire on the Mountain’. The passage was not difficult to read and had inference questions with options that were easy to eliminate.

Passage III was on ‘Judicial reforms – Providing justice to the poorer sections of society’. The language in this passage was moderate. There were questions on central idea, inferences and also of the agree-disagree type. There was one question on vocabulary in the passage. They were all of easy to moderate difficulty level.

Passage IV was on interplay between characters and setting in literature. The passage was abstract but not very long to read. The questions were on specific detail, main theme, and on vocabulary from the passage. The passage was of moderate difficulty level to read, but the questions were easy to solve and should have been attempted.

Overall, the English Language section was easy in terms of difficulty level with no surprises thrown at the students. Students with a good level of preparation would have been able to answer 18-20 questions correctly in 25 minutes.

Logical Reasoning

The LR section had four passages with 6 questions each. The section was moderate to difficult.

Passage I was on Merit and Coaching institutes. The second passage was a business case study.

This passage had a couple of tough questions. The third passage was on AI governance in India. The fourth passage on "Words" was abstract, and a tough read. The vocabulary in this passage could have been daunting for some students.

All the passages had questions of the True/not true, inference, strengthening/weakening and application types. The application questions required students to apply the principles from the passage to hypothetical situations. A few Passages were taken from Indian Express and Times of India.

A good student should be able to answer 14-16 questions correctly in under 30 minutes.

Legal Reasoning

This year’s pattern saw a slight deviation in the number of questions per passage. There were 32 questions in this section with 5 passages covering topics like inheritance under Hindu Maintenance Act and more recent issues like Digital Personal data protection Act, Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection Act), Press and registration of periodicals Bill 2023 and online defamation.

Another change that was evident in this year’s legal section was that questions were not necessarily situation based, unlike last year. Also, there were some direct questions that were asked from the passages.

Questions from the passage on Family law were repetitive in terms of testing similar concepts in different ways. The passage on DPDPA had questions that were not that direct but could be inferred from the information given in the passage. The passages on Online Defamation and Juvenile Justice were very easy and direct application of information was all that was required.

The Hindu, The Wire and Telegraph were some of the sources from where the passages were taken.

Overall, The Legal Section was Easy-Moderate, more tending towards the easier side, and 26+ could be considered a good attempt in about 30 min.

Current Affairs and General Knowledge

This Section had predictable questions but was different in terms of the importance/relevance of the passages to the questions, compared to last year. The passages held little value in the previous papers as far as GK section is concerned. This year’s paper had questions that can be answered directly from the passage. More than knowledge, it was also a test of inference. Three passages were from different speeches including Ambedkar’s Speech on Constitution, Wedgwood’s Speech on Jallianwala Bagh and PM Modi’s Speech on the Chandrayan mission. G20 Summit and Israel-Palestine Conflict were the most probable topics to be tested this year as we discussed in our GK sessions, and vindicating us, there was knowledge based basic questions from these topics.

Surprisingly, a lot of questions from this section did not feel like Current affairs or GK section but felt like more of general inference-based questions which could be solved from the given passage without any previous knowledge.

Difficulty level of this section was Easy to moderate, and a good attempt would be 22+ in around 15 minutes.

Quantitative Techniques

There was a total of 12 questions spread over two sets (each consisting of six questions) in this section.

The first set, on cars, was a relatively easier set. It was about details regarding cars of three categories for four states. The questions were mainly based on comparisons of a particular type of car from one state to another type of car in another. Students with a decent level of preparation who attempted this set would have been able to solve all the questions as the questions were direct and not difficult. The topics tested included ratios, percentage, averages. These were of easy to moderate level difficulty.

The second set was a difficult one to crack and involved complicated calculations. It was about distribution of working population between rural and urban areas. There were three categories of working population in both the areas whose percentages were given.

Students who attempted this set would have wasted a lot of time getting all questions correct. Except for a couple of questions, the others needed intensive calculations to be performed. The concepts tested included ratios and percentages.

A good number of attempts in 8-10 minutes will be around 6. If one was able to spend about 15 minutes, the expectation would be to attempt around 8-9 questions correctly.

Overall, the difficulty level of this year’s paper was not that high and quite doable, which means a higher cut-off can be expected. Cut off for Top 10 NLUs could be around 85-90.

All the best!