Some Tips on How to Prepare for SBI PO Exam – An Effective Guideline

An effective guideline and better result oriented study plan for success in SBI PO Exam

The post of the Probationary Officer (PO) is one of the most popular jobs among candidates aspiring to work in banks. The State Bank of India (SBI) conducts the recruitment exam for this post every year and receives a large number of applications for the same. A PO holds the position of an Assistant Manager (AM) on probation and is part of the junior management, (sometimes referred to as the Scale 1 Officer). The online exam is going to be conducted in the last week of April and the first week of May.

The preliminary exam will be followed by a main exam. To clear the paper, your preparation needs to effective and exam oriented. Here are some tips for your study plan that you should remember while preparing for the paper:

  • The preliminary exam is going to be an online objective exam having 3 sections:
    1. English Language,
    2. Quantitative Aptitude (Maths) and
    3. Reasoning Ability.
    You will have to attempt 100 questions in 1 hour.
  • The English language section will have questions based on reading-comprehension, sentence rearrangement, sentence improvement and sentence error spotting. The focus of your preparation should be on improving your reading speed, level of comprehension, vocabulary and usage skills.

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  • Studying the commonly made grammatical errors is a must in order to crack the sentence improvement and error spotting questions. Understanding of contextual vocabulary is also necessary to tackle questions on synonyms, antonyms, fill in the blanks and cloze test.
  • The Quantitative Aptitude section contains questions on arithmetic, simplification and data interpretation. Shortcuts and time saving tricks are necessary in this section.
    1. You should concentrate on squares, square roots, cubes, cubes roots, fractional values of percentages when handling data interpretation and data analysis questions. Memorizing the formulae and frequently used results will help you a great deal in solving questions based on simplification.
    2. Important topics: Profit and loss, simple interest and compound interest, time and work, time and distance, mixture and alligation and mensuration.
    3. The Reasoning ability section of the SBI exams is generally considered to be very difficult and time consuming. Appropriate question selection becomes critical here. It is best to avoid lengthy and complex questions.
    4. Important topics: Puzzle test, sitting arrangement, syllogisms, blood relations, ranking test, mathematical inequations, sequence and series, coding-decoding and input-output are the important topics out here. You can expect some logical reasoning questions as well. These questions are generally based on statement-course of action, statement-assumption, statement-conclusion and statement-argument.
    5. You must attempt online mock tests so as to fine tune your strategy and sharpen your time management skills. Remember that attempting 100 questions in 60 minutes is a challenging task, especially when negative marking provisions are also there.
    6. For each incorrect answer, 0.25 marks will be deducted from your overall score. Therefore, it is recommended that you don't do any careless guesswork.