Ask a Student: The Cambridge Law Test
Many future Law Students have questions about the student experience. What is it like to study at Cambridge? How is Law taught as an academic subject? What are Cambridge colleges like?
Our Cambridge Law students help answer questions like these, and the example below, through the Ask a Student email.
I’ve never studied Law before and I’m worried about the Cambridge Law Test. Do you have any suggestions?
The Cambridge Law Test is assessing your skills to study law. They are not looking for specific legal knowledge, and this tends to be reflected in the essay titles. Instead, you need to make sure you feel confident in your ability to structure a good essay/argument, organise your thoughts clearly and provide justifications for your points. It may be helpful to look at the news briefly prior to taking the test, just to have a feel for the goings on in the world at the moment, but the titles will not require any specific knowledge at all.
How did you prepare for your Cambridge Law Test?
I looked at the examples you can find online and I found reading general news articles helped in my comprehension of the text I was given.
I’m concerned about taking the Cambridge Law Test. Do you have any advice for me?
The biggest advice I would give for the Cambridge Law Test is to practice — and I cannot emphasise this enough. So, you should certainly try to sit the test several times yourself (under timed conditions! I found that writing so much in one hour is not an easy feat at first!). I hence found that the more times I practised, the more I was able to draw out the relevant information needed from the extracts efficiently.
Although the test will differ every year, the main structure remains the same, and thus the skills required remain the same as well. From my experience, I believe the CLT tests time management skills and conciseness. I would hence recommend practising by summarising judgments, articles and cases — in this way, you can also mimic the tests, once you have run out of samples.
Given the fact that there are a limited amount of samples online, I would also recommend you to keep one full test for just before the exam — once you have finished all the preparation and revision.
What do you think is the best way to revise for the Cambridge Law Test?
It is well worth your time to look over the past papers online and perform a mock exam, if possible. Even though you will not be able to mark it particularly accurately, familiarising yourself with the timings you need to use and the thought processes required will be very helpful to you.
We ask applicants to the Law programme at Cambridge to sit the Cambridge Law Test if and when they are invited to interview. We do not require or consider the LNAT, LSAT, or any other pre-interview assessment. For further information about the Cambridge Law Test, including sample tests and a grading rubric, please see our website.
Do you have your own questions about the student experience at Cambridge? Email Ask a Student with your questions, and receive answers from a current Cambridge Law student.
As always, questions about the Law course are best directed to the Outreach Team at the Law Faculty, while specific questions about admissions are best directed to the college that you are interested in applying to.
The information in this article is considered correct at the time of publication.
