Have you attempted the Indian Judiciary exams from one or more states and failed?
Were you a college topper who was sure of success and still failed?
Have you not attempted the exams at all because people have told you the questions are simply too tough and the syllabus too vast?
Have people erroneously told you that you will remain stuck in the lower Judiciary with no career progression to higher courts?
Do you plan to attempt the exams but have more or less decided you won’t pass because you aren’t good enough and the pass percentage is so ridiculously low?
Perhaps you are working or practicing right now, and your friends have told you that your preparations cannot continue side by side.
Excuse the blunt questions, but when it comes to the Indian Judiciary exams, we see too many candidates fall victim to some very common mistakes and misinformation that either prevent them from clearing the exams, or simply not attempting them.
Result, many meritorious candidates lose out on a chance to shape a highly prestigious and rewarding career in the Judiciary, and the country loses out on appointing a judge it sorely needs.
Common mistakes during preparation
At LawSikho, we often use the terms ‘preparation jaundice’ and ‘preparation diarrhoea’. Can you guess what they stand for?
Within three months of starting, you need to cover three major subjects and six minor subjects, so you feel confident about the concepts that you have covered and can explain them to others as well if required.
If you are studying for only 3-4 hours a day, you will try to finish at least the three major subjects (but not the six minor ones). If this is not happening, you are probably suffering from preparation diarrhoea.
You spend all your time talking, discussing, worrying, buying books, begging people for notes, and going to coaching classes, but after three months, you realise you have not covered even three subjects on which you can confidently take a test.
On the other hand, there’s preparation jaundice – or people trying to study on their own – which is a good thing, but instead of covering the Judiciary syllabus, they are trying to acquire complete mastery over the subject.
Law is a bottomless subject. The deeper you dive, the more you will find to learn. But is it relevant for your preparations?
If not, why are you doing it? Perhaps your teachers or parents said studying more is always good. Not in this case.
Consider the time you will be given to write the exam – to answer a question of 10 marks during the mains, you will have only 15 minutes.
Most people can’t write more than 500 words even at full speed without stopping to think. And once you pause to think or recall, you will probably not manage more than 200 words. Whereas you will need to write 700-800 words within this time in a structured way.
Being a college topper is no guarantee of success
Cracking the Judiciary exam is not difficult, it is merely a long game that requires about 5,000 hours (roughly 200 days) of focused preparation.
But just because you were a topper in college does not mean you can crack the exams without those 200 days of preparation. This is because Judiciary preparation is different from that for other competitive exams.
A basic way to illustrate this difference is to look at the following questions from college exams:
- What is free consent? What are the implications of a contract entered into without free consent?
- What is the difference between fraud and undue influence? Explain with the help of decided cases
- What factors invalidate free consent? Explain with the help of case laws
These are the kind of direct questions that most of you have encountered before, and your approach while answering them has most likely been exactly the same as that of thousands of other students.
You have Identified the list of important case laws taught in class, laid hands on a copy of a friend’s notes, read up the bare act, and read a commentary or guide. After all, you only need to remember all of it for a single semester.
Obviously, the Judiciary exams are a different ball game. As an example, look at this question from Delhi Judicial Services mains:
- How do you distinguish between void agreement and void contract? Does a void contract have similar legal implications to a voidable contract?
If you have simply read the bare act without knowing about this question, you will go through the provisions of the act without imagining that such a question can be asked. So you will have wasted time and lost focus.
And yet, most candidates study for the Judiciary exams just the way they studied for college exams. And hope that they will crack the exams based on their sincerity and not much else. Certainly not strategy or planning.
Do you know how many states to prepare for?
Two states? Three? One? The question of how many state judicial services exams to prepare for has always been tricky, but we have an answer based on our experiences.
Obviously, preparing for one state is risky. The exams are not held every year, and one bad day in the exam centre could ruin all your months of preparation and put your Judiciary dreams on hold for the next two-three years.
On the other hand, more than three states is unrealistic. You will end up putting too much pressure on yourself trying to practice state-specific mock tests and keeping up with the variations in syllabi.
So will it be two states (with apologies to Chetan Bhagat) then?
Join our free three-day (LIVE only) bootcamp on ‘How to Crack Indian Judiciary Exams’, May 27-29, 6.00-9.00 p.m. IST daily. Take the first step to change your life, and the lives of millions seeking justice.
Find out what you have been doing wrong, what you can do right, which state judicial services exams are ideal for you, and what strategies you need to adopt to maximise the time and effort you put into your preparation, whether you are a student, a practicing lawyer, or working in a law firm somewhere.
As always, we will help you with customised strategies and roadmaps to ensure the highest chances of success, and expect nothing in return but three hours of your time for three days.
Important: Since this course is for Judiciary exams in India, the bootcamp will be useful only to Indian citizens with an Indian law degree.
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