CLAT 2028 and the proposed new pattern

What is proposed, with page numbers

Everything below is from the Report itself. Page references are the Report's own numbering, so you can check each one against the PDF.

Three sections instead of five — Logical Reasoning and Legal Aptitude; Language and Comprehension; Quantitative Techniques (pp. 31–32).

General Knowledge and Current Affairs removed altogether (p. 31). This is the single biggest change for anyone currently building a news-reading habit.

Ten to fifteen questions a section, two hours for the paper (p. 32). Far fewer questions than the 120 on the current paper, which implies each one carries much more weight and is likely to be longer.

No essay, but a roadmap for adding one in later cycles (pp. 47–50).

For PG: the same three sections, plus a multiple-choice Legal Knowledge section on developments in the preceding two calendar years, and a constructed-response Problem Question section in which a candidate solves one of three legal problems (pp. 53–58), marked by individual NLUs for candidates shortlisted on their MCQ scores (pp. 58–60).

What has actually been decided

For CLAT 2027: nothing changes. The Governing Body resolved on 18 July 2026 that there would be no change to the syllabus, the pattern or the sections for either paper. The Convenor and paper setters will consider the Report's suggestions on question format and quality "in a feasible manner" — which affects how hard the questions are, not what the paper looks like.

For CLAT 2028: not decided. A committee to be constituted by the Office of the Chief Justice of India will consider the recommendations further, and the Consortium will weigh those and the public feedback in preparing for 2028. Not yet decided — under consideration.

The Report itself proposed 2027 as the first year of the new system (p. 5). The Governing Body's decision replaced that timetable. Nothing published so far says which of the proposals, if any, will be adopted. Any site telling you the CLAT 2028 pattern is confirmed is telling you something the Consortium has not said.

Sources: Report of the CLAT Expert Committee 2026 and the Consortium press release of 21 July 2026. A fuller walk-through of the Report, including the Committee's membership and its institutional proposals, is drafted at app/clat-expert-committee-report/ and publishes as /clat-expert-committee-report/ once reviewed; it is not linked here while it is still a draft.

If you are in Class 11 now

You are the cohort this actually lands on, and you have to prepare for two possible papers at once. That sounds worse than it is, because the overlap is large.

Prepare the overlap first, and prepare it hard. Reading comprehension, argument analysis and legal aptitude are in both versions of the paper, and in the proposed one they are most of it. Every hour spent on inference, unstated assumptions and multi-step reasoning is an hour that pays off under either pattern.

Do not drop the news habit yet. GK is proposed for removal, not removed. If the 2028 paper keeps it and you stopped reading in Class 11, you cannot rebuild two years of context in three months. Keep it cheap — fifteen minutes a day, one source, notes you actually revisit — rather than dropping it entirely.

Get the quantitative section to competence early. It survives in both versions, and with ten to fifteen questions in a three-section paper it would carry roughly a third of the weight rather than a tenth.

A Class 11 plan that works under either pattern is on the Class 11 preparation page.

Terms you will see in coaching material about 2028

Several phrases have gone round about the new pattern that are worth treating carefully, because they are being repeated as if they came from the Report.

"Rule derivation questions." A question type in which the candidate infers a rule from applied examples rather than being given the rule. It is a recognisable format in comparative tests. Whether the Report names it as such is a separate question. [VERIFY: whether "rule derivation" appears as a named question type in the Expert Committee Report 2026, and at what page.]

"Functional literacy." Used to describe the proposed Language and Comprehension section. [VERIFY: whether the Report uses this phrase, and at what page.]

"Data sufficiency." A question format in which you decide whether the given data is enough to answer, rather than answering. [VERIFY: whether the Report proposes data sufficiency for the Quantitative Techniques section, and at what page.]

The Committee’s terms of reference did include benchmarking CLAT against the LSAT and the LNAT (p. 3), so comparisons with those tests are well founded even where a specific question type is not.

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