Admissions
- 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.