AIBE Constitution questions: nearly 14, not the stated 10

The Bar Council of India publishes a syllabus for the AIBE. It gives Constitutional law 10 questions out of 100, the same weight it gives the Civil Procedure Code.

We counted the Constitution questions in 19 real AIBE papers, from AIBE III in 2012 to AIBE XXI sat on 7 June 2026. Across the five most recent papers the average is 13.8, and not one of those five asked only 10.

If you are planning your revision from the published table, you are under-weighting the biggest subject on the exam by close to four questions a paper.

The short version

• The Bar Council's published syllabus allocates 10 questions to Constitutional law.
• Across the newest five papers, AIBE XVII to XXI, we counted 69 Constitution questions. That is an average of 13.8.
• Across all 19 papers we counted 244, an average of 12.8. It is the largest single subject in our whole set.
• This is a change. Across the seven oldest papers the average was 10.4, which is the published number almost exactly.
• Even on the most cautious reading of our own classification, the Constitution still runs about 2.4 questions above its stated share.
• Half of the recent Constitution questions we looked at turn on a named case. A clean copy of the Constitution on your desk does not answer those.

What the Bar Council says this subject is worth

The current syllabus is a one page table titled "Syllabus for All India Bar Exam-XXI", published on the official exam site on 2 March 2026. It lists 19 subjects and the number of questions each one carries. The top of it looks like this, in the Bar Council's own wording and spelling:

That table is not a suggestion, it is what the Bar Council publishes as the syllabus. And it is not new: it is identical, row for row, to the AIBE XX syllabus of 27 September 2025. A settled allocation, printed twice.

On the face of it, the Constitution and the CPC are worth the same, and both are worth more than criminal law. That is not what the papers do.

What 19 real papers actually show

There are no subject tags on AIBE questions. The Bar Council publishes the papers and the answer keys, not a breakdown of which question belongs where. So we classified all 1,900 questions in our 19 papers ourselves, reading by hand every one a pattern could not settle.

Here is the Constitution, split by era:

And paper by paper, so you can check any one of them yourself:

Read down that column. In the last twelve papers, exactly one came in under 10, and that was AIBE XII back in 2018. In the newest five the lowest count is 12 and the highest is 17. The stated figure of 10 has not described a recent AIBE paper once.

The most cautious version of the same finding

We will not hand you a number we cannot defend, so here is the weakness in it.

The Bar Council lists Public Interest Litigation as its own subject, worth 4. PIL questions and constitutional questions share a border. A question about writ jurisdiction can honestly be filed under either heading, and we file those under the Constitution. Our PIL count on the newest five comes out at 2.6 against a stated 4, so we are 1.4 short there.

Now suppose every single one of those missing PIL questions is actually sitting inside our Constitution pile, which is the worst case for us. Take all 1.4 back off. The Constitution still averages 12.4 against a stated 10.

Or roll the two together and compare like with like. The Bar Council promises 10 plus 4, which is 14. We count 13.8 plus 2.6, which is 16.4. The pair runs 2.4 questions over, and no classification argument makes that go away.

Has this changed since the older papers

Yes, and that is the part almost nobody knows.

For the exam of 2012 to 2016 the published table was right. Seven papers, 73 Constitution questions, an average of 10.4. If you had used the syllabus to budget your revision for AIBE VIII, it would have served you well.

From AIBE X in 2017 onwards it stops being right and stays wrong in the same direction. Twelve papers, never once averaging near 10.

There is a second era change in our set that points the same way. Across our 19 papers we counted 28 questions of jurisprudence and legal theory and 14 of public international law. Neither appears on the Bar Council's list of 19 subjects at all, and the newest five papers carry none of either. The exam used to wander outside its own syllabus and has stopped. We cannot show that one caused the other and will not claim it. Both are true, and both mean the same thing for you: old papers are a poor guide to what the current exam weighs.

What actually gets asked

Counts tell you how much time to spend. The stems tell you what to do with it. These are real questions from AIBE XXI and AIBE XX, quoted exactly.

Under the scheme of the Constitution of India, once a Proclamation under Article 352 is in operation, Parliament may legislate on matters in the State List by virtue of:

As per the Constitution of India, a linguistic community in India seeks to preserve its unique script and literature. Which constitutional provision guarantees them the right to conserve the same?

The case of Parmanand Katara v. Union of India (1989) is primarily associated with which of the following rights?

Those three are three different jobs. The first gives you the Article and asks what follows from it. The second gives you a small fact pattern and asks you to find the provision. The third gives you a case name and asks what it stands for.

We pulled eight Constitution stems from the two newest papers to look at this properly. Four of the eight turn on case law: one asks which landmark case expanded the scope of Article 23, one asks which decision called repeated re-promulgation of Ordinances a "fraud on the Constitution", one asks which case carried a particular observation by Lord Wright about habeas corpus, and one is the Parmanand Katara question above. The other four are provision questions, including one asking which Article is the legislative basis for Parliament enacting the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981.

Eight questions out of 244 is a sample, not a proof. But it is a sample from the two papers that matter most, and the split it shows is worth planning around: roughly half of this subject is case recall, and case recall is the half your book cannot help you with.

What to revise, and what to skip

Give it the time that 14 questions deserve, not the time that 10 deserves. This is the whole point of the article. The Constitution is worth more marks than any other subject on the paper, and about 40% more than its own syllabus row admits.

Article numbers, in both directions. The questions above go provision to consequence and fact to provision. Being able to recognise an Article number is not the same skill as being able to find the right one from a description of a problem, and the paper asks for both.

The landmark cases, by what they decided. Four of our eight sample stems were case questions, and every one of them was the same shape: here is a case name or a judicial observation, tell us what it is about. That is pure recall and it is worth a list.

The Constitution where it crosses into other subjects. One of those AIBE XXI questions asks which Article lets Parliament enact an environmental statute. Environmental Law has its own row in the syllabus worth 2. Constitutional questions wearing another subject's clothes are part of why this subject over-delivers.

What to skip: constitutional theory of the jurisprudence kind. Not one of those 28 jurisprudence questions is in the newest five. If you are practising on 2012 to 2016 papers because they are the ones floating around free, you are training for an exam that is no longer set that way.

Also skip the instinct to give every subject a fair share. The syllabus has rows worth 2 questions. The Constitution is worth seven of those rows put together.

Which Bare Act to carry

A clean copy of the Constitution of India, and it is the first thing into the bag.

Two honest caveats on that. First, the Bar Council's carry-in rule says "BARE ACTS (without notes and comments)" and it publishes no list of which titles are allowed, so nothing official says the Constitution is or is not covered by that wording. Second, and more practically, the book only answers half of this subject. A bare Constitution is excellent for "which provision guarantees this right" and useless for "which case is Parmanand Katara". Budget accordingly: look up the provisions, and know the cases before you walk in.

If you want the carry-in rules themselves, with both of the Bar Council documents that disagree about them, we have written those up separately in what you can carry into the AIBE.

What these numbers do not tell you

We would rather state the limits than have you find them.

• The classification is ours, not the Bar Council's. It does not publish one. Where a question sits on a border, our call is a judgement, and the PIL boundary above is the clearest example.
• One set per edition. Each AIBE paper is printed in four sets, A to D. We hold one set for each edition, mostly Set A. Whether the other sets carry the same questions in a different order or different questions altogether is not something we can show, so we do not claim it.
• 19 papers is 19 papers. Averages move with one more paper, and AIBE XXII in November will be the twentieth. We will recount.
• Counts are not difficulty. Nothing here says the Constitution is the easiest or hardest part of the paper, only that it is the biggest.

Where these facts come from

The syllabus table is the Bar Council's own, quoted from Syllabus for All India Bar Exam-XXI, published on the official exam site on 2 March 2026 and identical to the AIBE XX syllabus of 27 September 2025. The spellings in our table are theirs.

One warning about searching for the syllabus. The Bar Council of India's own website carries an AIBE page whose address still ends "aibe-xvii". It prints an older syllabus and it contradicts the current exam in several places. It is a primary source and it is out of date.

The question counts are ours. They come from 19 real AIBE past papers held on munotes, 1,900 questions in total, classified by us and counted on 23 September 2026. The three quoted stems are reproduced exactly as printed, from AIBE XXI questions 53 and 20, and AIBE XX question 20. The other case questions described above are AIBE XXI questions 19, 28 and 47. We have rounded nothing up, and any number here can be checked by sitting the paper and counting.

What to do next

The next exam is AIBE XXII on 29 November 2026. Registration opened on 19 August 2026 and closes on 27 October 2026.

Before you rebuild your timetable around 14 Constitution questions, go and verify the claim. Sit AIBE XXI, count the Constitution questions in it yourself, and see whether you get 14. That is a better use of an evening than reading another page about weightage, including this one.

All 19 AIBE previous year question papers are on munotes as timed practice: 100 questions, a three hour timer, and answers taken from the Bar Council's official keys. Lifetime access to all 19 is Rs 499, paid once.