Last few days are left where your hard work and consistency will decide how you are going to spend the next five years of your student life and another fifty years of a professional life. At this point you can’t afford to lose focus. You need to stick to the strategy that has worked for you and maybe experiment with certain things that can boost your score. The D day is approaching and you need to approach the CLAT paper accordingly.
Here are some tips and advice to make the maximum of this last lap and ensure your entry into the dream NLU.
As you have been told again and again newspaper reading is a must for cracking an exam like CLAT. I hope you have been reading the mainstream newspapers like The Hindu, Indian Express regularly. Missed some days? Don’t worry. Continue from where you left. This law Month, make sure that you are updated with every legal news and relevant current affairs of this CLAT Season. Revise the items that you did a few months or weeks ago and make sure that your reading habit pays off and you don’t struggle with memory at this stage.
One of the most important resources to streamline your preparation in the last month is Previous Year Questions. You can’t afford to skip this. It will act at a lighthouse to guide you and prepare you for the most important areas, and you will develop the ability to separate weed from the chaff and focus on relevant types of questions that are repeatedly tested in CLAT. Stop everything that you are doing and go through past year question papers, especially from the year 2020 onwards. Look at the passages and options and get a hang of how questions are formed in those years. This way you will know which areas are frequently tested. How the questions evolved over the years and what type of reasoning is asked frequently. This should be step one for your preparation at this type if you have not don’t it already.
Then comes the most important aspect of CLAT Examination, which is Mocks. CLAT is not a paper of memorising and no matter how good you are at cramming CLAT is not going to reward you for that. All that matters is your aptitude and reasoning skills from the given Context. You have to use your bright mind on the spot, and every question comes a s a new challenge where almost everything you need to know is already present in front of you. You just need a cool mind, Fast decision-making and the ability to reason out to choose the correct answer from the given options. Practice as many mocks as you can in this last month to work on the most essential aspect of this exam, which is speed and accuracy.
More important than writing the Mocks is analysing your performance after each mock. There should be a blueprint printed in my mind at this stage about what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are. Where are you losing marks consistently and which areas are you most comfortable with. How you want the approach the paper depends on how your experience has been in mocks. Which section to start first and how much time is spent on which section is a very important data that you need to be sure about yourself and your abilities. It’s okay to lose marks as long as you know what is not working and what is working.
It is advised that you write a mock in the same environment as that of the original paper and if possible, in the same time of day as the original CLAT exam. That way even your body clock should know that you have to give your best performance during those 2 hours of the day. Analysing the mock should take a similar amount of time as you spent while writing it.
By now, you must have a strategy in mind for approaching Mock. See when you got the best score and stick to that strategy. Don’t waste too much time trying to get perfect, but navigate through the sections that gives the maximum score. It’s a competitive exam with almost lakhs of students competing with you. You don’t have to score 100% but you have to be better than the majority. Don’t worry, even a topper will lose some marks here and there. You just have to focus on what works best for you.
If you are comfortable with any section, for example, legal reasoning, don’t ignore it in the last days and look for complex reasoning involved in legal reasoning questions. If you are not too comfortable with any section, say for example quantitative techniques, you should devote some time to getting familiar with data interpretation and practice your high school level concepts of percentages, averages, etc. Don’t waste your full day in mastering a single section, but keep improving every day in a systematic manner.
If you have been taking notes or writing words from the editorial in a separate notebook, now is the time to start revising. All your efforts will be in vain if you don’t spend time revising what you have prepared so far. Very little time is left for a lot of new things to learn so trust your preparation and make sure all your efforts are rewarded by regular revision.
At this point, you should also focus on tips and techniques for solving multiple-choice questions. There is negative marking in CLAT so you can’t be reckless in areas where you are not sure. You need to learn the art of elimination and make sure that even when in doubt you make a calculative risk and decide when to leave the question unattended. Look for the probability as if you get one question right you get 1 mark but if you get it wrong, you end up losing 0.25 marks so do the maths in your head and try to get the maximum score using calculative approach in doubtful questions.
To sum up, Its time to go through the highlighted parts of your notes and newspapers, a thorough study of past year papers, revise the words you shortlisted for English language section, sticking to the strategy that works for you in Mocks, practice the areas where you need more clarity, Approach your teachers for any doubts, Make a strategy for attempting the passages and eliminating irrelevant information and the options and effectively crack the paper.
Just one more month and you will have the best college life in a prestigious national law university of your dream, where you will look back at this month and say to yourself, “ It was all worth it”.
All the best !
