Two hours, 120 questions: time and attempt strategy

CLAT gives you two hours for the whole paper and no sectional clocks. That freedom is also a responsibility. The order of sections and the time each one gets are decisions you make, and they can change your score as much as your knowledge does.

Most candidates who "ran out of time" did not read too slowly everywhere. They lost ten minutes on one stubborn passage, or spent too long on a section they liked, and paid for it in the last section. A time plan stops that from happening.

The basic arithmetic

120 questions in 120 minutes is one minute per question on average. But sections are not equal:

• Current Affairs and GK questions are fast. You either know the answer or you can narrow it quickly. Many take well under a minute.
• Legal Reasoning questions are slow. Each principle must be applied carefully to facts.
• English and Logical sit in between.
• Quant varies: some questions are one-step calculations, others need a few steps.

So a good plan gives time away from GK and gives it to legal.

A time plan

Here is one plan that adds up to exactly 120 minutes. Adjust it after your mocks.

Check: 16 + 36 + 25 + 25 + 12 + 6 = 120 minutes.

Per-question times use the middle of each range, for example 36 minutes ÷ 30 legal questions ≈ 72 seconds.

Turn the plan into clock times

Minutes are hard to track under pressure. Clock times are easy. If the exam runs from 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm, the plan above becomes:

Write these checkpoints on the first page of your question booklet as soon as you are allowed to write. Then one glance at your watch tells you whether you are ahead or behind.

Choosing an order

The booklet presents sections in a set order, but you can answer them in any order you like. Three common approaches:

1. GK first. It is quick, builds momentum and banks marks in the first quarter of an hour. Then legal while you are fresh.
2. Strongest section first. Starting with confidence settles nerves, especially for anxious candidates.
3. Booklet order. Simplest, with no risk of skipping a section by accident, but it may leave legal for when you are tired.

There is no single correct order. Try two or three in consecutive mocks, keep everything else the same, and compare both score and stress. Then stick with the winner. Changing your order on exam day is a gamble.

When to leave a passage

Every passage has a budget. A legal passage with five or six questions gets about six to seven minutes; an English passage about five to six.

The rule: when you reach one and a half times the budget, stop. Answer the questions you can, mark the rest in the booklet, and move on.

A worked example. A legal passage has 6 questions. At about 70 seconds each, the budget is 6 × 70 = 420 seconds, which is 7 minutes. One and a half times that is 10.5 minutes. If you are still on that passage at the 10-minute mark, you are paying for it with questions in later sections. Leave it.

Come back only if you have buffer time at the end. Often the second look is quicker, because your mind has kept working on it in the background.

The OMR sheet

Fill the OMR sheet as you go, passage by passage or section by section. Leaving all 120 bubbles to the end is risky. Even at a few seconds per bubble, that is several minutes, and under pressure bubbling errors multiply, for example shifting every answer by one row.

A good middle path: answer a whole passage in the booklet, then transfer its answers to the OMR together. It keeps your reading focused and the bubbling accurate.

Testing your plan in mocks

In every mock, write the actual start time of each section in the margin. Afterwards, fill in a table like this (hypothetical example):

Totals: planned 120, actual 13 + 44 + 24 + 27 + 12 = 120, with the buffer used up. The candidate saved 3 minutes on GK but overspent 8 on legal, so the buffer vanished. The fix is not to rush legal. It is to find which legal passage ate the time, and apply the leave-a-passage rule earlier.

After three or four mocks, a pattern appears. Adjust the plan to fit your real speed, then keep it stable.

Practice

1. A candidate plans 25 minutes for English and the section has 24 questions. About how many seconds per question is that?
2. The exam starts at 2:00 pm. The candidate does GK (16 minutes) then legal (36 minutes). At what time should legal end?
3. A logical passage has 5 questions with a budget of 60 seconds each. At what point should the candidate leave it?

Answers:

1. 25 × 60 = 1,500 seconds; 1,500 ÷ 24 = 62.5 seconds.
2. 2:00 + 16 = 2:16; 2:16 + 36 = 2:52 pm.
3. Budget = 5 minutes; one and a half times = 7.5 minutes.

What to do next

• Write your own time plan that adds up to exactly 120 minutes.
• Convert it into clock checkpoints for your exam slot.
• Test two different section orders in your next two mocks.
• After each mock, fill in the planned-versus-actual table.
• Read how to use negative marking to your advantage before deciding how many questions to attempt.