AIBE Previous Year Question Papers – Where to Find Them and What the Last Papers Actually Asked

Updated 23 September 2026

AIBE question papers are published by the Bar Council of India on the official AIBE portal after each examination, when the objection window opens. They are not sold, and no coaching site holds a version the Bar Council has not already released. What the papers do not come with is any analysis of what they asked, and that is where most candidates lose the value.

Below is what the last three papers actually contained, subject by subject, set against the weightage the syllabus advertises. The two do not match, and the gap is consistent enough to prepare against.

Where to find the official AIBE question papers

The official AIBE portal is the source. Following each examination the Bar Council publishes the question paper as a PDF so that candidates can raise objections to individual questions during the objection window. Those PDFs stay up. They are set-wise, so the file you open may be Set A, B, C or D, and the question order differs between sets while the content does not.

One warning, because it catches people. The Bar Council of India’s main website carries a page headed “Previous Year Question Papers”. That page relates to the National Qualifying Examination for Indian nationals holding foreign law degrees. It is a different examination with a different syllabus, and the papers on it are not AIBE papers. Search engines frequently return it for AIBE queries.

Anything described as an AIBE paper with an answer key attached is somebody’s reconstruction of the key, not an official one, unless it comes from the Bar Council’s own answer key release. Treat the questions as authoritative and the answers as an opinion until you have checked them yourself.

What the last three papers asked, subject by subject

The AIBE syllabus publishes a weightage: so many questions per subject, totalling one hundred. Candidates plan against it. Taxmann’s editorial team classified every question in the recent papers against the nineteen subjects, and the actual counts came out as follows.

Subject	Stated weightage	AIBE XIX	AIBE XX	AIBE XXI
Constitutional Law	10	12	15	14
CrPC, 1973 / BNSS, 2023	10	9	7	10
CPC, 1908	10	10	8	9
IPC, 1860 / BNS, 2023	8	7	8	8
Evidence Act, 1872 / BSA, 2023	8	8	8	8
Contract, Specific Relief, Property, NI Act	8	11	12	8
Family Law	8	6	8	8
Tort, Motor Vehicles, Consumer Protection	5	5	4	5
Professional Ethics and Misconduct	4	3	4	4
ADR including Arbitration	4	4	4	4
Law related to Taxation	4	4	4	4
Public Interest Litigation	4	4	4	2
Labour and Industrial Laws	4	4	4	3
Administrative Law	3	3	2	3
Company Law	2	2	2	2
Environmental Law	2	2	2	2
Cyber Law	2	2	2	2
Land Acquisition	2	2	0	2
Intellectual Property Laws	2	2	2	2
Total	100	100	100	100

Three things fall out of that table, and all three change how you should allocate revision time.

Constitutional Law has never once come in at its stated weightage. It is advertised at ten. It ran twelve, then fifteen, then fourteen. Across those three papers it averaged more than thirteen questions, which makes it comfortably the largest single subject in the examination and larger than the syllabus suggests. A candidate treating it as equal in size to CPC is under-preparing the biggest block on the paper.

Seven subjects have not moved at all. Evidence and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, ADR, Taxation, Company Law, Environmental Law, Cyber Law and Intellectual Property came in at exactly their stated figure in every one of the three papers. For those, the published weightage is reliable and you can plan against it to the question.

The volatility is concentrated. Outside Constitutional Law, the movement sits in the Contract, Specific Relief, Property and Negotiable Instruments group, which ran eleven and twelve before dropping back to eight, and in the small subjects, where Land Acquisition disappeared entirely from AIBE XX. A subject worth two marks that sometimes returns zero is not worth a week of revision.

How the difficulty has moved

Subject counts tell you what was asked. They do not tell you how hard it was to answer. The line that matters in an open-book paper is whether the answer is in the Bare Act on your desk or somewhere it cannot reach, and on that measure the last five papers look like this.

Paper	Answerable from a Bare Act	Not answerable from a Bare Act
AIBE XVII	78	22
AIBE XVIII	78	22
AIBE XIX	75	25
AIBE XX	87	13
AIBE XXI	73	27

AIBE XX was the softest paper of the five. Only thirteen of its questions lay beyond a well-tabbed set of Bare Acts. AIBE XXI had twenty-seven, the highest of the run, and anyone who had calibrated on the previous year found the paper had moved underneath them. The result bears it out: the Monitoring Committee moderated the AIBE XXI result and brought the qualifying marks down by three.

Note what that column does not do. It never falls below thirteen. In every paper of the last five, somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of the marks were unreachable by search alone, and a candidate relying wholly on retrieval was capped well short of a safe score before the paper began.

How to use a past paper properly

Most candidates read past papers. Reading them is nearly worthless, because the AIBE does not test whether you recognise a question. It tests whether you can find the answer inside ninety seconds, in a book you may carry but may not annotate.

Work them instead, under the conditions of the hall.

1. Three hours, clock running, phone away. One hundred questions in one hundred and eighty minutes is ninety seconds each. Build in a thirty-minute buffer for revision at the end and the working budget drops closer to ninety seconds flat.
2. Only the Bare Acts you would actually carry. Clean copies, no notes, no highlighting. Practising with an annotated volume trains a skill you cannot use. Taxmann’s Bare Acts for the AIBE are published without comments for exactly this reason.
3. Do not attempt it in order. Scan first and take the direct-lookup questions, which should close in thirty to sixty seconds each. Then the keyword questions, abandoning any search that passes two minutes. Then the case law and doctrine questions, where the Bare Act will not help you and the Act on your desk is dead weight.
4. Log what cost you time, not just what you got wrong. A question you answered correctly in four minutes is a worse outcome than one you guessed in twenty seconds. The paper is long before it is hard.
5. Re-work the same paper a fortnight later. The point is not the score. It is whether the searches got faster.

Our note on getting real value out of mock tests goes into the timing in more detail, and the syllabus and exam pattern guide sets out the full nineteen-subject structure.

What a stack of loose PDFs will not give you

Downloading twelve papers gets you twelve hundred questions in the order the examiner set them, which is deliberately mixed so that no two consecutive questions come from the same Act. That order is useful once, on the day you simulate the examination. It is the wrong order for everything else.

To revise Family Law you want every Family Law question the Bar Council has ever asked, together, with the answers, so you can see which provisions recur. That means regrouping the papers by subject, which is several days of work if you do it yourself.

Taxmann’s CRACKER for the AIBE is that work done: 1,162 solved questions from twelve papers, AIBE X to AIBE XXI, regrouped subject by subject with each question carrying the paper that asked it and an answer key closing every subject. It also reproduces the whole AIBE XXI paper with its question-by-question difficulty classification, adds three full-length mock tests with practice OMR sheets, and names the legacy provision alongside its current counterpart so a question set years ago under the IPC remains workable under the BNS.

Taxmann.com | Students carries the wider set of resources for candidates working towards enrolment.

Frequently asked questions

Where can I download AIBE previous year question papers?

From the official AIBE portal at allindiabarexamination.com, where the Bar Council publishes each paper as a PDF during the objection window that follows the examination.

Does the Bar Council of India publish AIBE past papers on its main website?

The page on barcouncilofindia.org headed “Previous Year Question Papers” relates to the National Qualifying Examination for Indian nationals holding foreign law degrees, which is a different examination. AIBE papers are on the official AIBE portal.

How many AIBE past papers should I work through?

Enough to see the variation. The difficulty of the papers moves: AIBE XX had thirteen questions that could not be answered from a Bare Act, AIBE XXI had twenty-seven. One paper tells you what one examiner did once.

Do AIBE questions repeat?

Questions are reframed rather than reproduced. The same provision is asked again in different words, which is why regrouping past questions by subject is more useful than reading papers end to end.

Which subject carries the most questions in the AIBE?

Constitutional Law. It is advertised at ten questions but ran twelve, fifteen and fourteen in AIBE XIX, XX and XXI, making it the largest single block on the paper.

Are AIBE answer keys circulating online reliable?

Only the Bar Council’s own answer key is official. Keys attached to paper PDFs on third-party sites are reconstructions and should be verified against the provision before you rely on them.

Can I use past papers if the law has changed?

Yes, with care. A question set under the Indian Penal Code is still a live question under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in most cases; what changes is the section number. Answer it under the current provision and note where the substance actually differs.

How long should I take per question when practising?

Ninety seconds. Three hours for one hundred questions leaves no more, and less once you allow a buffer for revision at the end.

Examination dates, objection windows and answer key releases are set by the Bar Council of India and change by notification. Confirm the current position on the official Bar Council of India portal before acting on it.