AILET Important Topics You Should Study

By Vivek Subramanian

Know the topics from which questions of higher difficulty level are asked in AILET exam. Also, know how you should prepare to ace different sections of AILET.

AILET is an exam given by a smaller number of students than CLAT, since it is conducted by and for NLU Delhi alone. You would think that since the number of students is less and hence the competition is lower, the exam would be easier than CLAT. However, this is not the case at all. In several topics, AILET has surprised students by asking questions much tougher than what they were prepared for. 

So, it is clear that AILET challenges students at a level higher than CLAT. Is this true across the paper? Not necessarily. From analysing the last 5 years of CLAT and AILET papers, we have found that the difficulty levels are similar in the following topics:

• Constitution
• Legal Awareness & Aptitude
• General Knowledge
• Current Affairs

However, in the below mentioned topics, the level of questions asked by AILET has frequently been tougher than that of CLAT:

• Logical Reasoning
• Mathematics
• English including Comprehension

So how is a student to prepare effectively? These are not small topics, and their weightage constitutes a large part of the exam total.

The good news is that there will not be anything new or additional to study. The syllabus of AILET does not include any new topics that a student preparing for CLAT would not have encountered. All you have to do is just solve tougher problems in the areas you have already covered.

The next question is – where to get such tougher problems? One obvious answer is to look at past papers of AILET.

Another answer is if you are enrolled in a good coaching programme or a crash course programme that covers AILET as well, you should get some targeted material that addresses the questions that would be asked in AILET.

A third option is to look for a good online test series for AILET, or a CLAT programme that offers some papers for AILET 2021 as well. Here again you should find some good tough questions that will give you practice at the AILET level.

There are also a couple of other strategies that we advise our students to follow which may lead to scoring marks in the paper.

We have generally seen that the Logical Puzzles asked in AILET tend to be much tougher than CLAT. And since puzzles usually appear as a block of questions, leaving the entire block is not a good idea at all. Instead, what you can do is that even if the question appears tough, spend a minute reading it to understand the information. Then scan the questions that follow. Very often, there would be one or two questions that are obvious or straightforward. They do not require much solving and would follow directly from the information given in the question. We commonly refer to these as ‘freebie’ questions. These are marks in your pocket that are hidden but can be easily obtained. This is not suggested as something you do in the first pass of the paper, but rather something that can be done in the second pass when you have already done the easy questions.

A similar thing happens in Reading Comprehension. Even though the passage may be tough and lengthy, sometimes in the block of questions that follow there may be a simple one on Idioms / Phrases or Synonyms / Antonyms. This is a ‘freebie’ question in the RC section. Again, something that would be hidden in plain sight, waiting for a slightly more diligent student to snap it up and put the marks in their pocket.

We hope that following these strategies will help you scale up to the challenge that AILET poses. Wishing you all the best!

Vivek Subramanian

About the Author:

Vivek Subramanian has a BTech from IIT Bombay and an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad. He has worked internationally in New York and Hong Kong in investment banking and management consulting, before deciding to return to India to pursue his love for teaching. He is the co-founder and Chief Instructor at ExamVictor.