SBI PO prelims strategy

The prelims only decides who reaches the mains, and its marks do not count in the final merit. That makes it tempting to treat it as a formality. It is not. SBI calls roughly ten times the vacancies to the mains, category-wise, and the competition for those places is heavy. Most candidates are eliminated here.

The good news is that the prelims is the most trainable stage of the exam. It tests a narrow set of question types under strict time, and the skills that clear it can be built in a few months of focused practice.

Three facts that shape the strategy

1. Sectional timers. Each section gets exactly 20 minutes. Time saved in one cannot be used in another, and once a section's timer ends you cannot go back to it.
2. No sectional cut-off. Shortlisting is on aggregate marks. You can survive a weak section, but every mark lost there must be made up elsewhere.
3. English is the largest section. Forty questions in 20 minutes is 30 seconds each, and 40% of the paper.

Put together, these mean the best prelims strategy is not "maximise your best section". It is "take clean marks from all three, with English as the anchor".

English: 40 questions, 20 minutes

• Rule-based questions are the fastest marks in the paper. Take them first, while your mind is fresh.
• In RC, read the questions before the passage. Answer direct fact and vocabulary questions first; leave long inference questions for last.
• If a para jumble does not open up in a minute, move on. Find the opening sentence and one clear pair of linked sentences; that often eliminates three options.

Quantitative Aptitude: 30 questions, 20 minutes

• Approximation questions reward rounding boldly. If the options are far apart, round to the nearest easy number and move on.
• In a series, check differences, then ratios, then alternating patterns. If none works in 45 seconds, skip.
• Read the DI heading and units before the first question. Many wrong answers come from mixing thousands with lakhs.

Reasoning: 30 questions, 20 minutes

• Start a puzzle with the clue that fixes a position ("A sits third from the left end"), not with a clue that only relates two people.
• If a puzzle has two or more cases after four clues and no clue is cutting them down, leave it. A five-question puzzle you cannot close is worth nothing.

Attempts, accuracy and negative marking

Each wrong answer costs a quarter mark. That changes how you should think about attempts.

Worked example. Compare two candidates in a 100-question prelims:

Candidate B attempted eight more questions and finished almost ten marks behind. High accuracy on fewer questions beats low accuracy on more.

Should you guess?

Most bank-exam questions have five options. A blind guess then has a 1 in 5 chance of +1 and a 4 in 5 chance of −0.25, so its expected value is 0.2 − 0.2 = zero: no gain on average, only risk. If you can eliminate even one option with confidence, the odds improve to 1 in 4, and the expected value becomes 0.25 − (0.75 × 0.25) = +0.0625. So: never guess blind, but an educated guess after eliminating options is reasonable. Our negative marking guide goes further.

Accuracy targets

• Aim for 90% accuracy or higher in each section in your mocks.
• If accuracy falls below about 80%, cut attempts and slow down.
• Do not chase "good attempts" figures quoted online. Cut-offs change with difficulty and vacancies every year. Compare yourself with the top scorers in the same mock instead.

Four weeks before the prelims

Keep your awareness reading going at a lower level through these weeks. The mains follows the prelims closely, and dropping current affairs for a month costs you there.

Mock analysis in three questions

After every mock, answer these in writing:

1. Which easy questions did I skip or get wrong?
2. Where did I spend more than a minute and a half?
3. Which question types will I start with next time?

The mock test guide sets out a full analysis method and an error log.

Practice set

1. A candidate attempts 34 English questions and gets 30 right. What is the net English score? 30 − (4 × 0.25) = 29.
2. A candidate has 3 minutes left in quant and two unsolved questions they can each finish in 90 seconds, and one question they would have to guess blind. What should they do? Solve the two they can finish; leave the blind guess, whose expected value is zero.
3. At 30 seconds a question, how long should 10 error-spotting questions take? About 5 minutes; less if possible, to bank time for RC.
4. A candidate scores 34 in English, 18 in quant and 20 in reasoning. Can they still clear the prelims? Possibly. There is no sectional cut-off, so it depends on whether 72 clears the category-wise aggregate cut-off for that year.
5. Why should puzzles come after the small reasoning sets? Small sets give quick, near-certain marks; puzzles are all-or-nothing and can eat the whole timer.

What to do next

• Take a full prelims mock this week and note your accuracy in each section.
• Fix the order you will attack each section, and follow it in every mock.
• Add one 40-question English sectional each week until the exam.