Graduate Admission
LLM Program (by coursework or research) is a one- or two-year program designed for those with legal training and experiences in law to give expanded knowledge of law or subject specialization. MLS Program will allow those coming from non-legal backgrounds and experiences to pursue a postgraduate legal education.
Undergraduate Admission
The LLB/PGDNL at JSW Law is a five-year program of study that leads to an initial law degree. A program that is designed to educate practice-ready lawyers.
“The school is the means of bringing GNH and justice to fruition,” says Princess Sonam Dechan Wangchuck, Honorable President of Jigme Singye Wangchuck School of Law.
Admission Calendar
| Date | Activity |
|---|---|
| 22 January 2024 | Open Online Admission Portal. |
| 22 February 2024 | Close Admission Portal. |
| 02 – 03 March 2024 | Bhutan-LSAT and Dzongkha-Test administered. |
| 23 – 25 March 2024 | Short-listed applicants notified of dates and locations of interviews. |
| 26 – 31 March 2024 | Interviews with short-listed candidates, final admissions decisions made. |
| 18 April – 22 April 2024 | Admissions decisions announced. |
JSW School of Law has instituted a unique and very competitive admission process in the country. Students wishing to study at JSW Law must apply in accordance with the procedure described below and must meet the following criteria.
Every Year JSW School of Law recruits no more than 25 students.
Applications for the 2024 intake will begin from 22 January – 22 February 2024. All interested candidates should apply online during that period. JSW Law collects a nominal amount of Nu. 500 as an application fee which is not refundable.
Applicants should be aware that admission to the law school is based upon three elements:
- Excellent Class XII marks, including at least a 60 in Dzongkha and English;
- Excellent skills in logical reasoning, analytical reasoning, and reading comprehension, as determined by a nationwide Law School Admission Test-Bhutan, which will be administered from 09 – 10 March 2024; and
- For short-listed candidates, a successful face-to-face oral interview – in English and Dzongkha will be conducted.
Who is eligible to apply?
Any person shall be eligible for admission to the Program who:
- has not previously availed of an RGoB Scholarship for a post higher secondary educational qualification.
- has not reached the age of 24 years old by the date of the closing of applications; and
- has not previously applied for admission to the Program more than once.
If you have any questions, please check out our FAQ below, or if you would like us to notify you when the application and recruiting process begins, please do not hesitate to email us at admissions@jswlaw.bt.
What are the Admission Criteria?
To attract the top future law students, JSW Law has adopted very different admission criteria and procedures for student admissions. The deadline for application is 22 February 2024.
Admissions decisions will be taken based upon the following criteria.
All students will be able to sit for the Entrance Examination. However, to be considered for admission, a student must have scored at least 60% each in both Dzongkha and English on the Grade XII BCSEA examinations.
Unlike many other schools in Bhutan, we do not rely exclusively on your Grade XII results. We will consider your Dzongkha and English scores (weighted at six points and five points apiece) and an average of your remaining courses (weighted at a total of four points). For shortlisting purposes and final selection, these grades will account for 25% of your final score.
All students meeting the cut-off requirement will be eligible to sit for the law school’s Entrance Examination. The entrance examination will account for 40% of your final score, and will include questions and exercises designed to test:
- Reading comprehension (English), with a weight equivalent to 10 points.
- Logical reasoning (English), with a weight equivalent to 20 points.
- Analytical reasoning (English), with a weight equivalent to 10 points.
All students meeting the cut-off requirement will be eligible to sit for Dzongkha Entrance Examination. The Dzongkha entrance examination will account for 10% of your final score. The Dzongkha entrance examination will be administered at the same time as Bhutan-LSAT.
Based upon the Grade XII results and Entrance Examination performance, JSW Law will create a “short list” of top students, who will be invited to Thimphu for a personal interview with the faculty. The interview will account for 25% of your final score for selection, and will be designed to test:
- Your abilities evaluated in the previous steps, especially oral and listening comprehension (both English and Dzongkha);
- Your enthusiasm and motivation for attending law school; and
- Your level of maturity and suitability for the practice of law.
The LSAT-Bhutan is a test of analytical reasoning, logical reasoning, and reading comprehension. The exam is in English and Dzongkha. The exam will consist of five timed sections: two reading comprehension sections, an analytical reasoning section, a logical reasoning section, and Dzongkha section.
The best way to prepare for the exam is to review the Official Handbook of LSAT-Bhutan and the sample questions below.
The Official Handbook includes information about the format of the test, tips on how to prepare for the exam, and sample questions. These questions are examples to give you an idea of what to expect and not the actual questions from the LSAT-Bhutan. If you spend sufficient time working through these materials, you will familiarize yourself with the test format and get practice in developing your analytic and reasoning skills further. This will improve your test score. Think of the LSAT-Bhutan as a challenge, where repeated (thoughtful, reflective) practice is required to perform optimally.
CLICK HERE to download LSAT – Bhutan Sample File 2021
- 60% in both Dzongkha AND English for your class 12 exams
- Entrance examination
- in person Interview
Of course we care about your academic results. In fact, given the importance of the written word for lawyers, we cannot consider any applications from students who earn below 60% in either Dzongkha or English in their class 12 exams. As for the rest of your grades– yes, we will consider them as well. But we do not have qualifying minimum percentage marks that we will insist upon for those grades. If you are a genius at maths but rusty in history, we will still consider you– just the same as if you were an ace at history but a dud in science.
But your high school grades/marks are not the only thing we consider in our application process.
We care as much or more about the skills you have that will make you successful as a lawyer (such as your ability to think logically, your problem-solving skills, your fluency with the written word, and your ability to critically analyze an argument and — when appropriate — respond with a counter-argument of your own).
You may have honed some of these skills at school–or in your private life outside of school–but they will not be prominently reflected in your class 12 marks. For this reason, we have designed our own JSW Law entrance examination that will test you on precisely these skills. Moreover, we weight the score you get on our entrance examination at 1½ times the weight we assign to your class 12 marks!
Once we have made a first cut of our applicant pool based on these two “numbers” (your class 12 marks and your score on our entrance examination), we next want to find out more about who you are as a person. Since no one examination can ever capture that, we will invite all of our final candidates to our office (Pangbisa, Paro) for an in-person interview with JSW Law faculty. During that interview, we will want to know what motivates you to become a lawyer as opposed to some other profession? What makes you excited about this career? What are your phobias? What kind of law might you one-day hope to practice?
As we like to say, the legal profession is more than “just a job,” and we wish to create a healthy community of colleagues even before you graduate JSW Law to become lawyers. For this reason, we will rank this in-person interview almost as highly as we do your class grade 12 scores.
JSW School of Law does not offer a stand alone PGDNL programme at this time. Please contact the Royal Institute of Management (rim.edu.bt) or Bhutan National Legal Institute (bnli.bt) for more information on their PGDNL programme.
With regard to this issue, the criteria for admission to JSW Law is identical to those governing admissions to the Royal University of Bhutan (RUB) and other undergraduate scholarships.
RUB requires that all students admitted on the basis of (Bhutanese) government funding be able to demonstrate Bhutanese Citizenship [RUB Policy on Admission and Regulation of Students §4.7.1, available at http://www.rub.edu.bt/]. All other students are welcome to apply as long as they can demonstrate “evidence of identity” using some means other than a CID card.
Admissions decisions will be made by an admissions committee composed of JSW Law faculty members. Inevitably, that committee will have to make very difficult choices in deciding whom to admit to JSW Law. Some truly exceptional applicants will be ranked 26th, 27th, and 28th. No matter how much we might like to do so, we simply will not be able to admit those candidates. But once the admissions committee makes its decisions, they will be deemed final.
We do hope that the process we have proposed will give you every opportunity as an applicant to convince us as faculty at JSW Law that you are the right fit for our new law college.
JSW Law wants to give you every opportunity to demonstrate to us how qualified you are to be one of our future students.
The practice of law requires skills that are not always adequately demonstrated by your Class XII marks. Lawyers need to be excellent communicators, and that is only demonstrated during an in-person interview. And lawyers need to excel at logical thinking and through their ability to process and analyze information and produce coherent statements demonstrating that analysis. This is what we are testing for.
No. As explained in the question, “Do you care about our academic results in other classes?” the admission process for JSW Law School strives to consider the whole student. As a student, grades are a necessary part of the whole student. If you have failed your other subjects or the other parts of your Class 12 exams, you will not be considered for admission to JSW Law School.
JSW Law wants to give you every opportunity to demonstrate to us how qualified you are to be one of our future students.
The practice of law requires skills that are not always adequately demonstrated by your Class XII marks. Lawyers need to be excellent communicators, and that is only demonstrated during an in-person interview. And lawyers need to excel at logical thinking and through their ability to process and analyze information and produce coherent statements demonstrating that analysis. This is what we are testing for.
We want you to apply to JSW Law even without your marks—just based on the conviction that you are the right student for us to consider. We’ll take your marks into consideration once they are available.
No
Then you will not be invited to the in-person interview and your application will no longer be considered for admission.
The Arts have not captured the law as a discipline. To the contrary, Bhutan needs all kinds of lawyers, not just those who studied the arts in high school, but also those who are good at maths, science, business, and planning. The law is a diverse profession. We will need environmental lawyers who know not just how to find relevant laws, but also how to understand the science and politics of climate change and sustainable development. We will need corporate lawyers who understand not just how to draft a contract, but also how to ensure that those documents reflect a viable business model that will work in Bhutan, and produce benefits for Bhutanese citizens.
Applicants from all subject streams are welcome.
Nice try!
The entrance examination will test your logical thinking and your ability to process and analyze information and produce coherent statements demonstrating that analysis.
Prior to the examination, we will distribute a study guide to help you prepare for the types of questions we will ask, but please be forewarned that it is a very different type of examination as those you might be used to.
Absolutely. But you will have to commit by April 2017. JSW Law’s admissions process is earlier than the RUB admissions process. This has been done intentionally so as to allow you to make an informed decision if and when you have more than one good option from which to choose.
The decision for government scholarship program will be made before JSW Law’s decision. However, government scholarship for law students will be completely taken over by JSW Law, therefore, if you are interested in studying law and also need scholarship you will have to apply to JSW Law.
Our best advice to you would be to take the time between now and November to study for your exam, so that you can meet our deadlines.
Sorry, but no. 25 is our upper limit, not based on our own capacity to teach, but rather on our estimate as to how many law graduates will be able to find employment in Bhutan.
When your parents say to you ‘you’re going to make a good lawyer one day,’ it’s usually because you came up with a response to something they said or did that is hard for them—logically—to refute.
Logic is the core skill of the legal craft. It is for this reason that we want to know about your basic fluency with logic—your ability to dissect others’ logic and respond to it with logical arguments of your own.
Sure we will. Convince us that you are ready for law school, and that you have the necessary grades, and we will gladly consider your application.
We will be curious as to what study habits you developed during your second go-around that perhaps you did not have during the previous year, but we will not punish you for self-improvement.
Of course. We only want those students joining us at JSW Law who genuinely want to be there, so we would gladly allow you to withdraw your application.
Yes. You should not be older than age of 24 years old by the date of the closing of applications.
Initially, no.
In future years, pending vacancies in our student body and only on a very limited case-by-case basis, we will consider students who have taken a general liberal arts course of study to enter JSW Law as a second-year student, assuming that they can demonstrate satisfaction of courses similar to those offered during our first year.
Not at present. The number of students is calculated based on the determination of how many graduates will be able to find employment as lawyers or legal professionals upon graduation in Bhutan.
Not necessarily.
Some of what you study at law school will necessarily involve a study of Bhutan’s history, including its philosophy and its Buddhist traditions. There will be a mandatory course on economics to help broaden your maths background. Some parts of law do involve maths, maybe not complex calculus, but you do want the maths to add up for your client’s business contracts.
So if you absolutely HATE history and maths, you might want to think twice about whether law school is the right fit for you.
Our short answer is: it depends.
In all honesty, having a criminal record will make it more difficult for you to convince us that you are a good fit for the law school– and for the legal profession.
But there are exceptions. If what you did was the result of bad decision making as a teenager and you have now grown more mature and wiser as a result of that youthful transgression– we can understand that as well. It depends on what you did, and how you justify your breaches of the law to us.
But given the nature of the legal profession, and the importance of lawyers being seen as ethical and law-abiding individuals, we would need to see a very convincing explanation not only of what happened, but also of how you see yourself as an ethical and upstanding member of the legal profession moving forward.
Unfortunately we cannot consider applications from this kind of a student. Your Grade XII results are an essential part of our application process.
Tattoos are a personal choice and won’t count against you. JSW Law will be a smoke free zone.
Yes, we will consider an application from a student who finished Class XII in 2011.
Of course. We only want those students joining us at JSW Law who genuinely want to be there, so we would gladly allow you to withdraw your application.
Graduate Admission
JSW Law is in the process of developing Master of Laws(LL.M.) and Master of Legal Studies (MLS) programs. The students will get to choose to pursue either a one year advanced degree by coursework or a two-year degree by research.