Sri Lanka Law College Entrance Exam Eligibility Checker

Sri Lanka Law College is the only institution that admits people to the Bar, under the Incorporated Council of Legal Education Ordinance No. 2 of 1900. It publishes two admission routes, and both are decided by a short list of conditions that either hold or do not. This checker applies each of them separately, so you can see which one is blocking you instead of a single yes-or-no.

The age rule

The notice asks applicants to have “completed 17years of age at the time of forwarding the Application”, then converts that into a date-of-birth cut-off. The conversion is plain subtraction:

latest qualifying date of birth = closing date − 17 years

That is worth stating precisely because the boundary decides real applications. A candidate born on exactly the cut-off date qualifies; one day later does not. The checker also computes the same test a second way — by counting completed years from your date of birth — and treats a disagreement between the two as a bug rather than a judgement call. Where the closing date falls on 29 February, the day is clamped to 28 February rather than rolling into March, which is the direction that matches “completed 17 years”.

The A/L rule most people fail

The A/L condition is not “three passes”. It is two credit passes and an ordinary pass at one and the same sitting. In Department of Examinations grading, A, B and C are credit passes and S is an ordinary pass, so the test is:

credits = count(grade in A, B, C) ≥ 2  AND  passes = count(grade in A, B, C, S) ≥ 3  AND  all from one sitting

Two things follow. A third credit also satisfies “an ordinary pass”, because a C outranks an S — so A, B, C qualifies. And three passes with only one credit does not qualify, however respectable it looks on a results sheet. The sitting clause is the one that catches people every year: grades gathered across two attempts are treated as two separate results, not a combined set.

O/L languages and the examination

At O/L you need a credit pass — a C or better — in English Language, and a credit pass in Sinhala or Tamil. An S in either one blocks the application. The examination that follows has four papers on the General Entrance route: General Knowledge, General Intelligence, Proficiency in English Language, Proficiency in Sinhala or Tamil Language. Each carries a 40% minimum, and the notice is blunt about it — less than 40% on one or more papers and you are not eligible for entrance. Merit is then computed from General Knowledge and General Intelligence only; the two proficiency papers qualify you but do not rank you.

The Special Entrance route, for graduates holding a recognised foreign LL.B., repeats every one of those citizenship, age, A/L and O/L conditions and adds a degree test on top. Its examination is three law papers of 100 marks each with the same 40% per-paper bar, ranked on the total out of 300, and the number admitted cannot exceed the number who qualified at the previous General Entrance Examination.

Both notices state a closing date and the corresponding date-of-birth cut-off, which makes them a free test of the age formula. If closing date − 17 years did not reproduce the printed figures, the formula would be wrong. It reproduces both exactly:

The Attorneys-at-Law programme runs for three years of lectures, followed by a Practical Training Course and an apprenticeship. Adding only the durations the Law College publishes gives 3.5 years as the floor — the Practical Training Course has no published length, so treat that as a minimum rather than a schedule.

1. 1

   Entrance examination

   Sit the entrance examination for the route you qualify under.

2. 2

   Preliminary year1 year

   First of the three years of lectures in the Attorneys-at-Law programme.

3. 3

   Intermediate year1 year

   Second year of lectures and examinations.

4. 4

   Final year1 year

   Third year of lectures and examinations.

5. 5

   Practical Training Course

   Required of students who pass every examination in all three years, as pre-qualification for admission to the profession.

6. 6

   Apprenticeship6 months

   Apprenticeship programme under an Attorney-at-Law.

7. 7

   Enrolment

   Enrolment as an Attorney-at-Law in the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka.

LL.B. graduates are exempted from attending lectures. Graduates of Sri Lankan state universities and Kotelawala Defence University sit only the Final examination, provided they completed the prescribed subjects in their degree, then complete the six-month apprenticeship.

• Sri Lanka Law College — General Entrance Examination notice, academic year 2025 (PDF)
• Sri Lanka Law College — Special Entrance Examination notice, academic year 2027 (PDF)
• Sri Lanka Law College — Admissions and current notices
• Sri Lanka Law College — Curriculum, exemptions and the apprenticeship programme
• Ministry of Justice — Incorporated Council of Legal Education
• Department of Examinations, Sri Lanka — online applications for the General Entrance Examination

Every rule, fee, duration and pass mark on this page was transcribed from those notices and cross-checked on 2026-09-22. Two things are deliberately absent because no published figure supports them: the merit cut-off for admission, and the years of standing required of the Attorney-at-Law who supervises the apprenticeship. Closing dates, fees and the date-of-birth cut-off change with every intake — the page states the intake its figures come from and does not claim to track the current application window in real time. This site is not affiliated with the Incorporated Council of Legal Education.