CLAT 2026 Analysis

After the roller-coaster that was CLAT 2025, it was natural for aspirants to walk into CLAT 2026 with a mix of hope, anxiety, and uncertainty. CLAT 2025 was far from smooth — what should have been a routine exam cycle turned into months of litigation, urgent hearings, contradictory court orders, revised results, and widespread errors. It is a year remembered for all the wrong reasons, shaking the confidence of thousands of students.

Amid this anxiety, the Consortium released two sample papers in the final week before CLAT 2026, signaling a possible shift in difficulty.

CLAT 2026 delivered exactly that a moderate-level, balanced exam, noticeably more challenging than the unusually easy CLAT 2025, yet fair and well within the expected pattern.

Overall Difficulty Level: Moderate

CLAT 2026 Section wise difficulty level

GK: Easy

Legal Reasoning: Easy to Moderate

English Language: Easy to Moderate

Quantitative Techniques: Easy

Logical Reasoning: Moderate & Tricky

Good Attempts: 105+

Section-Wise Analysis

1. English Language – Easy to Moderate

What Defined This Section

Shift towards vocabulary-heavy questions compared to previous years.

Passages were literature-oriented (Sapiens, Animal Farm) instead of news-driven topics.

Reading complexity was moderate, but passages required careful interpretation.

Question distribution ensures a balance between inference, tone, meaning, and contextual vocabulary.

2. Logical Reasoning – Moderate & Tricky (Most Challenging Section)

The Game-Changing Twist

Students expected conventional Critical Reasoning. Instead, the section shifted significantly towards

Analytical Reasoning, surprising many.

What Appeared

Blood relations

Ordering & sequences

Coding–decoding

Caselist-style logic

Deductive reasoning puzzles

One particularly difficult Tabular Arrangement set, which was:

Time-consuming

Prone to misinterpretation

The single biggest bottleneck in the entire paper

3. Legal Reasoning – Easy to Moderate

What Worked

Very predictable and student-friendly.

Covered contemporary themes such as:

Same-sex marriage

Governance

Basic legal principles

No unusual or complex passages; clarity of principles mattered most.

Direct, traditional CLAT-style questioning.

One of the most scoring sections this year.

4. General Knowledge / Current Affairs – Easy

Nature of Questions

Direct, predictable, current-affairs driven.

Topics included:

American taxation

SCO

Air India

Pahalgam

Major national/international events

The highest-scoring section of CLAT 2026.

5. Quantitative Techniques – Easy (Calculative)

What Appeared

Ratio

Percentage

Proportion

Arithmetic fundamentals

Key Takeaways from CLAT 2026

Logical Reasoning defined the exam, especially the difficult Tabular Arrangement set.

GK and Legal remained the biggest scoring areas for aspirants.

QT was clean, calculation-oriented, and predictable.

CLAT 2026 marked a return to a balanced, fair, and structured paper after the turbulent CLAT 2025 cycle.

Conclusion

CLAT 2026 was a balanced, fair, and moderately challenging paper — a significant improvement in structure and quality after the turbulent CLAT 2025 experience.

We wish all CLAT 2026 aspirants the very best and extend our warmest wishes to everyone appearing for AILET 2026 this Sunday. Give it your best — the journey continues, and your hard work will carry you through.

Views are personal.

Author is Co-founder, LegalEdge-Toprankers