Among all Law entrance Exam, AILET 2018 is slightly tough to crack. The exam is generally of a tougher standard than CLAT. Yet, no exam is difficult if you have prepared well for it. AILET has five sections namely, Legal Aptitude, Verbal Ability, Logical Reasoning, Quantitative Aptitude and General Awareness/Current Affairs. Read the table to know the AILET 2018 Exam Pattern. The question before us today is how difficult it is to crack AILET 2018. Before we begin I would like to discuss the weightage given to each section in the exam.
AILET 2018 Exam Pattern
Subject
|
Weightage of marks
|
English
|
35
|
General Knowledge
|
35
|
Maths
|
10
|
Legal aptitude
|
35
|
Reasoning
|
35
|
Total marks
|
150
|
Marks per question
|
1
|
Negative marking
|
No negative marking
|
Now I will talk at length about what can be expected in each section of the paper-the kind of questions and their difficulty level.
English
First come English. In the English section, the first 9 questions would be based on the passage which will be given and you have to answer only on the basis of your understanding of the passage which should be moderately difficult. It will be unrealistic to think that this passage and related questions are very easy because the article will contain a theme which would need to be understood before answering. You might have to read the passage more than once and maybe even more than twice. You might need to give the passage a title and explain which bracket the passage falls in-political, social commentary, economic or philosophical.
It gets even tougher because sometimes there may be no passage at all and the paper begins with some 5 tough questions on antonyms and synonyms. Then that is followed by 2 questions where certain phrases will be given which you have to use to complete the given incomplete sentences.
Then 2 questions will be where two separate sets of sentences will be given and four phrases are given and each given phrase has to be used in one sentence from both groups and in the answer you have to specify the phrase and both sentences in which the phrase has been used.
Then come 3 questions where four sets of two sentences each will be given and you have to identify the similarity in the different groups and find out which set is the odd one out. For instance if three sets are in the question format and the last set is made up of positive statements then the set consisting of positive statements is the odd one out. Similarly, if the three sets are negative statements then the fourth set which is made of sentences which are positive assertions would be the odd one out.
Then comes grammar. Here you have 2 questions where you have to find which sentences are grammatically incorrect. Then there are 3 questions on idioms and phrases. Then next questions include six statements which will be given to you which you have to rearrange to form a paragraph and then answer 3 questions from that paragraph.
Then there are 4 questions where four sentences will be given for each question and in every question one has to choose the incorrect sentences out of the given sentences.
Then there are 11 questions where you have to fill in the blanks. In each question there will be four choices given out of which you have to choose the most apt word for filling in the blanks.
That makes it 35 questions for the English section. I would say that the level of questions is difficult for even an average student. Plus, the big change is that there were no paragraph based questions this time which I think makes the section even more difficult.
General Knowledge
Then comes GK. There will be questions on important groups formed by different countries for instance the Commonwealth nations and you could be asked the year of formation, the number of members, the names of members and other news related to these groups. Then comes sports where happenings at both national and international level will be covered. Women in news as in important women heads of organizations should be known to you.
The rankings of nations on different parameters such as richest, poorest, happiest, most safe etc. , important news related to environment, what are the different currencies of different nations, any new terms coined, different brands which own famous and international food outlets, different innovations in various field for example banking, insurance and banking related news, important awards and their recipients, subsidies and their benefits and beneficiaries
Then comes usage of commonly found materials such as silica gel, basic scientific information such as uses of different measurement scales for instance the Beaufort scale, names of different ambassadors, important and newest updates on financial news, ISRO news, more science news from organizations such as Indian institute of science education and research, Tata Institute of fundamental research, National chemical laboratory, Indian institute of sciences.
Then the next is important days such as international happiness day, then important geographical news such as world's largest marine protected sea, news from beauty pageants, sports for special categories such as special Olympics, and finally important inventions and discoveries. This covers the 35 questions from GK.
Legal aptitude
Now let us move to Legal aptitude. The first 9 questions will be based on principle which has to be assumed as true and then applied to the facts to arrive at the conclusion. The first subject covered is the Indian Contracts Act, wherein you should know what entails the acceptance of agreement, when the contract becomes voidable, then comes torts under which one must study vicarious liability, negligence and similar topics and then comes certain basics from the Indian Penal Code, and finally a reading of the Constitution is important.
Then comes legal news wherein you will find questions from the ongoing legal developments in the country such as which are the child friendly courts in India, important constitutional amendments, reservations and their percentages and important post holders for instance Central Vigilance Commissioner and their term of employment, important case laws, news about arbitration and mediation, when did the All India bar exam came into existence, important legal sayings by philosophers.
Then comes important judgments passed by the apex court i.e. the Supreme Court, important articles of the Constitution, interesting bans by the HCs and the SC for instance ban of Facebook accounts for children below a certain age, new bills passed by the Parliament, minimum wages for certain workers and more. This makes for the 35 legal reasoning questions.
Logical reasoning
Now let us move to logical reasoning. Here the questions are very different from what is normally expected by students. First of all there are around 3 logic based questions related to inter personal relations.
Then there will be another 5 unexpected, and lengthy and tough questions from logic and reasoning. I will give you an example of one question from the 2017 paper. The question was that there is an input machine to which when you feed words then the words fed are rearranged in a particular fashion. You will be given the input which is fed to the machine and four statements each of which are rearranged by the machine stepwise.
The question further said that in the first step the words are rearranged in a particular way and then comes the second step where the words are further rearranged and so on till the fourth step and you have to find the logical sequence in which the machine is doing the rearrangement stepwise and then apply the same logic to find out the rearrangement for a separate input. These questions are tough and not only do you need to spend time on these questions, and apply logic and your mind but they are also lengthier then what you would have usually expected.
The good thing is that the next 5 questions are simpler and expected and you need to just follow the instructions and then easily arrive at the answer. But then again one cannot call these questions simple. Then the next 4 questions would again be expected. These may be from seating arrangement category or any other popular logical reasoning category.
Then comes a mixed bag of questions from figuring out the direction of the car at a given time based on given information, arriving at the correct time of the event based on given information, relationship based logic, odd one out category, missing numbers or words in the series. Then come 5 passage based logical reasoning questions where you have to figure out which flawed pattern of reasoning from the passage resembles the one in the question or which statement when true would resolve the paradox in the paragraph. Thus this section comes to end.
Mathematics
Moving onto the last section which is ten questions on Maths. The section is expected to have questions from probability, then some simple questions from work and time, area of the rectangle, speed while upstream and downstream, simple and compound interest, average speed and time, linear equations, quadratic equations, averages, distance and time, work related questions, and then ratio proportion. One should find this section simple with decent amount of practice of the most popular and expected topics.
I would like to conclude with saying that the pattern of the exam has drastically changed in the last couple of years because now there is sometimes no passage in English which used to be the starting point of the exam in previous years. Earlier there used to be fill in the blanks questions which can also be missing in the next exam maybe.
The GK section is more or less the same as previous years but then in GK the syllabus is already so vast that nothing much can be said. But this section is fairly simple and full of expected questions and can be managed with one reading of the Manorama year book, listening to daily news and reading one good newspaper every day.
Now if we were to talk about legal reasoning then I'd say quite a few questions from principle and facts will be asked. Basic knowledge of contracts, torts, IPC, Constitution and legal maxims would be sufficient to ace this section.
Logical reasoning has changed over time as well. It used to be easier earlier in my opinion but that can also vary year on year. Questions are always asked on topics where you have to assume the veracity of given statements to arrive at a conclusion, then questions where you have to find which statement would weaken or strengthen the argument, questions on completion of series, then there are coding decoding questions but they were missing this time and replaced by unexpected questions which we talked about above. But pattern can keep changing so do not ignore the expected questions to go for totally unexpected ones. Prepare both. Then there are expected questions from words in similar groups, and relation based logic questions.
Maths is simple for one who is prepared and the pattern has been same over the years.
Overall I would say that the paper is becoming lengthier with passing years and earlier the easy sections used to be English, and legal reasoning and the tough sections used to be Maths and GK but that has completely changed over the years and now English is much tougher than usual and so is Logical reasoning. Legal reasoning and Maths are relatively much simpler now.
For someone to ace this exam I would say pay good attention to Maths, legal reasoning and GK but I recommend that one pays extra attention to English, and logical reasoning.
