Democratisation of modern education implies wide application of communicative practices in teaching and mastering by students of educational courses. Modern globalisation processes put before the society the need for the formation of appropriate conditions for the individual development of a person, his socialisation and the creation of a new intellectual strategy. The expediency of developing new intellectual strategies necessitates a radical revision of theoretical concepts of a person himself, bringing to a new level of study of a person and his intellectual prospects. There are two types of thinking: practical or manual thinking and theoretical or abstract thinking, and they have fundamentally different psychological nature. The relationship between these two types of thinking go through all stages of personality development: from school to Institute and from Institute to professional activity. For the professional work of a lawyer, the ability to adequately apply abstract thinking is very important. The developers of the tests for general educational legal competence (TGELC) understand the importance of developing theoretical thinking when getting higher education and its further applying in the professional activity. It is established that the reform of the legal system of Ukraine which is conducted in the context of the European integration aspirations of our country stimulates a number of state-level measures to ensure the proper quality of education of specialists of the second (master’s) level of higher education for law specialties. The research work considers a number of tasks proposed for the master’s degree programme admission in 2018. Logical-methodical analysis of tests for general educational legal competences in 2018, conducted by the authors, showed that they are made up at the high methodological level and meet the criteria of reliability, validity and verification, as required by testology. At the same time, it is noted that it is necessary to chose the texts for Section 1 and the conditions of tasks for Section 3 free from internal substantive contradictions, and to formulate the conditions of tasks more clearly, especially in Section 2, to avoid differences in their understanding

Keywords: test of general educational legal competence (TGELC), abstract thinking, practical thinking, logical reasoning, logic