When it comes to taking a year gap after 12th there are lots of students who drop a year for clat and land in good National Law Universities and many take this decision and regret it later. When it comes to my own personal experience I also took a one year drop and cleared CLAT in 2018 and there were many of my friends who cleared it along with me.
While you are in your 12th you have lots of things to do at once like managing the school classes along with the school subjects coaching classes and if you have enrolled yourself in any clat coaching then it becomes a tedious task to manage all the three together. I am not saying that it’s impossible or you won’t be able to manage these but it becomes difficult to manage when you have plenty of tasks in hand.
There will be times when you have to exclusively focus on the 12th boards preparation and have to take a long break from CLAT which is not good as you may lose the momentum for CLAT. And when you resume the CLAT preparation after your boards are over, you either have forgotten the concepts or you don’t like to prepare for it for some time as you have just ended giving the board exams and had studied extensively for that (The other reason applies to me it may not be true for everyone else).
So dropping a year becomes advantageous for you as you don’t have to focus on other things like your school subjects coachings you just have to focus on the CLAT preparation. Apart from this there are things like waiting for your board exam results which are most probably out in the month of may so you are equipped with thoughts like whether I have scored less marks or more in a particular subject or you will pass in the particular subject or not. Things like these are the distractions which are not good for your clat preparation! And dropping a year also doesn’t mean that you will surely crack the clat as chances are you may fall ill on the exam day, or there may be technical issues with the exams(This happened with me on the Exam day) or many other factors.
Remember these are just the possibilities that ‘may’ happen and I am not saying these things will surely happen. And chances are that you may not get your desired law school you may land in any private university(private universities aren’t bad as for eg Jindal Global Law School is considered as one of the top most law schools of India but it charges a very huge academic fees which everyone is not capable of giving and there are these KIIT school of law and Symbiosis law school which again charge big sum of money but less as compared to Jindal Global law school.
ILS Law college doesn’t charge big sum of money but here the chances of getting admission is very low unless you do exceptionally well in the entrance. But when you are aiming to get a seat in NLUs these colleges just come last in your priority list. Your mindset also plays a major role when it comes to dropping a year for clat for eg if you have the kind of thinking that ‘if I drop a year I will not be able to crack it or I will be wasting a year’ then I recommend you not to take a drop as you will only lose a year! ‘I am gonna crack clat this year and will not make the same mistakes as I made previously’ is the thinking which will lead you forward and get your desired college. And then there are students who make a time table and commit to stick to it from the very first day of the preparation but 99% students end up not following such things. If you know you can do such kind of things then go for it.
Personally what I did was to concentrate on my coaching classes and then after getting back home tried to finish the tasks given on the very day itself and revise the whole thing before going to bed and in the spare time I watched movies or did some interesting things like playing sports etc but every day I had this thing in mind that I have to complete my coaching work on the same day itself.
The ‘Crash course’ thing is also popular among law students most of them think that it’s ok if they don’t join clat coachings in 11th class or 12th class and directly join a crash course and get a seat in their desired college. Well when it comes to this I have seen cracking students by doing crash course but there numbers are very less. The reason being crash courses will make you study a little extra for any subject for example if you are putting 2 hours a day for a normal coaching you have to put 4 hours for a crash course as it usually consists of 30-40 days of whatever time is left after your boards till clat exam. Many students will manage with this but many can’t and teachers also try to cover the syllabus quickly so there may be some concepts which are left out! Well again it’s my personal opinion and many will agree with me and many won’t.
One query which most of the students have in their mind is should they take admission in any xyz college and then prepare for clat along with the college? The answer to this question again depends upon your capability to ‘manage’ things as you have to consider the things like the college will going to have their semester exams and you have to maintain certain attendance which is mandatory for colleges that means you have to attend regular classes or may be 3-4 times in a week with your CLAT coaching so it depends on you how you balance both.
Also at the year end you will have university exams just one or two months before clat which is a major hurdle in your CLAT preparation but students have cracked CLAT managing their colleges too so you have to assess yourself and take this decision. Also if after taking a year gap you don’t get your desired college then I will recommend you to join a college and then prepare for CLAT if you are considering to take a double drop. Also it’s really a tough decision for a double drop so think before you do such thing. Remember taking risk is a different thing and taking calculated risk is another.
It’s really a normal thing to take a year drop so don’t over think or stress over the thing that you are the only one taking it. There is that mindset where students think that NLUs provide for lucrative packages and they just get driven away by such thoughts it’s the truth but it applies only to top NLUs not every NLUs. And also just separate yourself from thoughts like non-NLU students don’t succeed in life that’s just a myth. At last I just want to say one thing that before taking the decision of taking a year gap for clat kindly think over your decision and try to seek advice from people who are already in this field so that you don’t regret you decision later!
“The views of the authors are personal“
