Study Techniques for CLAT 2023 I Section-wise

Study Techniques for CLAT 2023: A lot of dialogues and poetic moments stay with you from the evergreen classic, The Godfather. A major inspiration that stays or should stay is the dialogue, “Great men are not born great, they grow great,”  delivered beautifully by the character Don Vito Corleone. 

This essentially means your genius is not decided at birth, rather it is acquired by hard work, determination, and practice. There are no shortcuts and neither can you bend the time dimension. However, what can work in your favor is working smartly. Especially when it comes to competitive exams like CLAT 2023, working hard needs to be comped with working smart to finally “grow great”.

This blog will give you the section-wise study techniques for CLAT 2023. These techniques can be used along with your ongoing preparation to help ramp up your efficiency and accuracy.

Section-wise study techniques for CLAT 2023 #1: SQ3R

The SQ3R method is helpful in solving reading comprehension. In an exam like CLAT 2023 which depends entirely on reading comprehension in some form or the other for the entire paper, mastery over SQ3R become essential.

The five phases of the SQ3R reading comprehension approach are – survey, question, read, recite, and review.

1. Survey– The idea of surveying a piece of literature or text is to quickly skim through it to get an overview and idea of the structure. Since the comprehension questions asked may be from various topics, including technical and scientific topics, survey will help you identify the “main theme”, “keynotes”, “tone” and “argument style” at the outset. Moreover, since you will not need any prior knowledge of any specialized areas to understand or analyze the passages, a survey will help you extract information easily.
2. Question – When your mind is actively searching for answers to questions, it becomes engaged in learning. Hence, the idea here is to form as many questions as you can. Extract usable information from the passage by focusing on the 5 Ws: Who, What, Why, When, and Where. Alternatively, if you’re applying this method to question solving directly, you can go to the questions that has already been provided at the end of the passage. Read them.
3. Read – Now that you’ve formed questions or are done reading the attached questions, read the passage to gain answers. You do not have to memorize these points, but keeping them in mind when reading the passage will ensure you have a good grasp of its details without having to memorize them.
4. Recite – This is where you read the passage and answers you provided one more time. Now you might be wondering why should you invest your time in re-iteration. The idea is to “revise” and make no mistakes. This step will also help you deal with questions you may not have been able to solve in the first iteration.
5. Review – This is the final step and is optional. If you’re still waiting on one or two questions from the passage, you may want to review or skip the question. This depends on how much time can you afford. Also, you always have the option to come back to a comprehension later when you’re done with other questions. 

Now, understand that this method may come across as tedious or time-consuming. However, it is effective. With repeated application over a period of 6 months, you can gain mastery over the technique to improve your efficiency and accuracy. Check out our 6 months strategy for CLAT 2023 here. 

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Section-wise study techniques for CLAT 2023 #2: Spaced Practice

With the amount of new information CLAT aspirants have to learn every day, remembering—and understanding—it all can be tough. Especially so when the knowledge expected by the Consortium of NLUs requires breadth as well as depth. Spaced practice requires you to review the material over a long period of time. This gives your mind the time to form connections between the ideas and concepts so that the knowledge can be built upon and easily recalled later. This method can be helpful in 2 sections –

1. Legal reasoning section for CLAT 2023 – Questions like principle-fact or legal GK and vocabulary can be prepared efficiently using the technique of spaced repetition.
2. General Knowledge and Current Affairs Section for CLAT 2023 – In this section, each passage will be followed by a series of questions that will require you to demonstrate your awareness of various aspects of current affairs and general knowledge requiring depth and diversity of knowledge. 

Section-wise study techniques for CLAT 2023 #3: Read before Bed-time

You learn new things when you are awake, but you polish them when you are asleep, making it simpler to recall and properly use them when you need them. This is crucial for learning as well as for maintaining healthy brain processes. This is because when learning occurs prior to sleep, the learnt information benefits from consolidation during sleep, which does not occur for information that is learnt in the morning.

The idea with this technique is to focus on revision at the time when it matters the most, before going to bed each day. 

Alternatively, the step of revision goes in parallel with studying and testing. Your revision should be focused on 3 laps – every day, every week, and every month. 

• Dedicate at least one hour every day to revising all that you’ve read that entire day. This will help you synergize the study and apply it better. 
• Every weekend, before taking the sectional test, you should make it a point to revise the entire week’s worth of syllabus. 
• Next would be revising all that you’ve read so far before taking a full-length test.

This is because reading a subject or topic once does not help you retain it. 

Master technique for CLAT 2023: Pomodoro

Pomodoro study sessions clearly take the cake away with biggest margin. It is based on a very simple concept – “breaking large tasks up into smaller manageable timed units  (called “pomodoros”) is the most effective way to study”. The mechanism is also oriented to help you do focussed or deep work. Let’s see how it functions –

• Determine your goals and the amount of time you will spend studying. Divide your work into pomodoros or sessions of 25 minute each.
• Start your study session with the first slot of a 25-minute countdown. There are fun ways to track the time – You may follow along with someone’s YouTube study-with-me session or download a pomodoro application available on playstore.
• Keep distractions to a minimum during the pomodoro interval. Write down any thoughts that come to you. Keep away from social media.
• Take a quick 5- to 10-minute rest after 25 minutes. Make a call to a study-buddy, go for a stroll, get a coffee, or do something else soothing.
• Repeat. Take a lengthier pause of 20 to 30 minutes after 4 pomodoros.

You can apply this pomodoro technique to improve quality of study in all sections of the CLAT 2023 paper.

This was all about section-wise study techniques for CLAT 2023. We’ll come up with more blogs to aid your preparation. Stay tuned to Oliveboard for more tips. Ciao!