CLAT 2027 Pattern: Section-Wise Questions, 2023-2026 vs the Official Range

CLAT 2027 on Sunday 6 December 2026, 2:00 to 4:00 PM, is a pen-and-paper test of 120 multiple-choice questions, one mark each, with 0.25 deducted for every wrong answer. The Consortium gives each of the five sections a range rather than a fixed number. What it asked in practice is printed in each year's result notification. This guide puts the two side by side, explains what each section's passages look like, and ends with a net-score and pacing check.

CLAT 2027 UG question format and UG instructions pages.

Since the move to 120 questions the split has stayed inside a narrow band. English and quant were identical in all three papers (24 and 12). CLAT 2024 and 2025 set the same split; in 2026 legal and logical reasoning traded two questions: legal went from 32 to 30, logical from 24 to 26. Current affairs sat at the bottom of its range every year, at 28. Legal reasoning was the largest section in 2024, 2025 and 2026, and it also breaks ties: the instructions say equal marks are separated first by higher marks in the legal aptitude component, then by age, then by a computerised draw of lots.

The consequence is that CLAT is a reading test before it is anything else. Four sections out of five arrive as ~450-word passages. The legal section in particular does not reward memorised law: the syllabus says you "will not require any prior knowledge of law", and the task is to apply the principle printed in the passage to the facts in the question. The same syllabus adds that you "will benefit from a general awareness of contemporary legal and moral issues to better apply general principles or propositions to the given fact scenarios" — so reading the news helps, but the answer still has to come from the principle given.

With four options and a quarter-mark penalty, even a blind guess has a tiny positive expectation. The real cost of guessing is time, not marks: 120 questions in 120 minutes leaves an average of one minute per question including reading the passage. Guessing is worth doing on questions you have already read; it is not a reason to skim passages you have not.

CLAT is scored against a key that candidates can challenge, which is why the "scored out of" total changes each year. The CLAT 2026 cycle shows how the process runs. The Consortium published all four series of question booklets with their provisional answer keys on 10 December 2025, three days after the exam. Objections could be filed on the website from 5:00 PM that day until 5:00 PM on 12 December, at ₹500 per objection, refunded to the same account only if the objection was sustained. Objections by email, support ticket or phone were not accepted. A subject expert committee reviewed them, and the final answer key and results followed on 16 December 2025.

Two practical points follow. First, because the question booklets are published, you can check your own answers against the provisional key within days — keep your question booklet if the rules let you take it, or note your series. Second, a withdrawn question is removed for everyone: in CLAT 2026 the UG paper became a paper out of 119. It does not change the marking rule. The published scheme scores the common paper's raw marks; none of the Consortium documents cited here describes any normalisation, and every candidate sits the same paper at the same time.

What this means for mocks: score them on the full 120, but when you compare yourself with a past year's toppers or cut-offs, compare like with like. A mark of 90 was 75.6% of CLAT 2026's 119 scoreable marks, 76.3% of CLAT 2024's 118, and 79.6% of CLAT 2025's final 113 (our arithmetic). Seven withdrawn questions moved the same mark by four percentage points, which can be wider than the band between two NLUs.

The Consortium's pattern and past papers are also the basis of our paid CLAT 2027 Revision Kit, a PDF that ranks syllabus units by how often five official CLAT UG papers asked them.