A preparation plan should rest on the exam as IBPS has defined it. This page starts from the official scheme in the CRP CSA-XVI notification of 1 August 2026 and ends with a routine you can repeat every week. Figures from the notification are marked as such. The plan, the tactics and the routine are our advice, and the per-question numbers are arithmetic.
1. Know where the marks are
Prelims only shortlists. The notification says that only Mains marks are considered for final merit. So the two exams ask for different things: Prelims asks you to clear three sectional cut-offs and get into your State's shortlist; Mains decides your rank and your bank.
| Stage | Test | Marks | Share of the stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prelims | English Language | 30 | 30% |
| Prelims | Numerical Ability | 35 | 35% |
| Prelims | Reasoning Ability | 35 | 35% |
| Mains | General/Financial Awareness | 50 | 25% |
| Mains | General English | 40 | 20% |
| Mains | Reasoning Ability | 60 | 30% |
| Mains | Quantitative Aptitude | 50 | 25% |
The marks are from the notification; the percentages are arithmetic. Two things stand out. Reasoning is the largest block in both stages. And a quarter of the Mains marks sits in a subject that Prelims does not test at all.
2. Know your time per question
Every test has its own timer. You cannot borrow time from English to finish Reasoning.
| Test | Questions | Time | Seconds per question |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prelims English Language | 30 | 20 minutes | 40 |
| Prelims Numerical Ability | 35 | 20 minutes | about 34 |
| Prelims Reasoning Ability | 35 | 20 minutes | about 34 |
| Mains General/Financial Awareness | 40 | 20 minutes | 30 |
| Mains General English | 40 | 35 minutes | 52.5 |
| Mains Reasoning Ability | 40 | 35 minutes | 52.5 |
| Mains Quantitative Aptitude | 40 | 35 minutes | 52.5 |
What this means in practice (our reading):
- Prelims is a speed test. At 34 seconds a question, nobody solves everything; the skill is choosing which questions to do.
- A sectional timer rewards a fixed order inside each test: quick questions first, sets and puzzles next, the hardest last.
- In General/Financial Awareness you either know the answer or you do not. Thirty seconds is enough; the work happens before the exam.
- Candidates with compensatory time get 20 extra minutes for every hour of examination.
3. Decide when to guess
The notification deducts one fourth of the marks assigned to a question for a wrong answer, in Prelims and in Mains. Blank questions cost nothing.
Arithmetic: if you are right with probability p, the expected gain per mark is p minus 0.25 times (1 minus p). That is zero at p = 0.2. So:
- A blind guess you expect to get right less than one time in five loses marks on average.
- Once you have removed one or more options with a reason, a guess is usually worth taking.
- In Mains the penalty in marks is larger because the questions are heavier: 0.375 in Reasoning and 0.3125 in Quantitative Aptitude and General/Financial Awareness. The break-even probability stays the same.
Sectional cut-offs add one caution. If you are clearly strong in a test, wild guesses there only add risk.
4. A phased plan
IBPS runs this recruitment once a year, and the last two notifications both came on 1 August (2025 and 2026). The plan below is by phase, so you can fit it to whichever cycle you are preparing for. The lengths are our suggestion.
Phase 1: foundations (6 to 8 weeks). Arithmetic topics one by one, daily calculation drills without a calculator, grammar rules with error-spotting practice, and one type of puzzle at a time. Read one English editorial or business report a day. Start a current-affairs notebook now, even though Prelims has no awareness test.
Phase 2: sectional speed (4 to 6 weeks). Twenty-minute sectional tests, one subject a day, under the real timer. Fix your order of attempt in each test. Keep learning new topics, but the main work is doing known topics faster.
Phase 3: full Prelims mocks (last 4 to 5 weeks before Prelims). Two or three full 60-minute mocks a week with the three timers, each followed by analysis (section 7). Do not add new topics in the final week.
Phase 4: Mains (from the day after Prelims). The IBPS calendar for this cycle put Prelims on 10 and 11 October 2026 and Mains on 27 December 2026, about eleven weeks apart, while the Prelims result was scheduled only for November. Waiting for the result costs roughly half of that gap. Begin Mains work immediately: daily General/Financial Awareness, longer data-interpretation sets, multi-variable puzzles, longer reading passages, and full 125-minute mocks.
5. Subject tactics
The notification lists no topics, so these tactics follow our topic checklist.
Numerical Ability and Quantitative Aptitude
- Speed in simplification, approximation, number series and quadratic comparisons comes from tables, squares, cubes and fraction-percentage conversions known by heart.
- In Prelims, do the calculation questions first, then one data-interpretation set, then word problems you recognise at once.
- In Mains, practise reading a data set fully before touching the first question; most errors come from misreading a condition.
Reasoning Ability
- Start with the short items: inequality, syllogism, coding, direction, blood relation. Then puzzles.
- Pick puzzles in order of clarity, not in screen order. Leave a puzzle if two minutes pass without a firm placement.
- For Mains, practise puzzles with three or more variables and the verbal-logic types. At 1.5 marks each, a five-question puzzle is worth 7.5 marks.
English
- Read daily. Reading comprehension, cloze and sentence-order questions all reward a reader's ear more than rules.
- Keep a short error log of grammar points you got wrong; revise it weekly.
- The English tests are in English for everyone, including candidates who take the other tests in Hindi. If English is your weaker side, give it a fixed daily slot from the first week, because it has its own cut-off.
General/Financial Awareness
- Three layers: recent current affairs, banking and financial awareness, and static facts linked to banking.
- Daily: twenty minutes of news notes. Weekly: revise the week. Monthly: revise the month.
- Learn banking terms from how the Reserve Bank of India and the banks describe them, and connect each term to a news item.
6. Do not forget the non-exam hurdles
These are from the notification and can undo a good score.
- Local language. You must be proficient in the specified language of the State/UT you apply for. If your Class 10 or higher marksheet does not show that language, you will take a qualifying Local Language Proficiency Test before joining, and failing it means no appointment. Choose your State with this in mind.
- Computer literacy. A certificate, diploma or degree in computer operations, or computers or IT as a subject at school or college, is mandatory.
- One State only. Vacancies differ widely between States. The updated annexure of 29 September 2026 shows, for example, 1,752 indicative posts in Uttar Pradesh, 576 in Madhya Pradesh, 491 in Bihar and 410 in Rajasthan. Vacancies are indicative and are only one side of the contest; IBPS does not publish how many candidates apply in each State.
- Documents. OBC (non-creamy layer), EWS and disability certificates must be in the prescribed formats and within the dates the notification gives.
7. A weekly mock-analysis routine
- Take the mock at the same time of day as a real shift, with the sectional timers on.
- After it, sort every wrong and every skipped question into one of five tags:
- Did not know: the topic is not prepared. Fix: study it.
- Knew but slow: right method, too much time. Fix: timed drills.
- Silly mistake: misread or miscalculated. Fix: slow the first read, check units.
- Bad selection: spent time on a hard question and missed easy ones. Fix: reorder your attempt.
- Bad guess: guessed and lost marks. Fix: guess only after removing options (section 3).
- Look at each section's score separately. A section that is falling needs attention even if the total is rising, because Prelims has a cut-off in each test.
- Count the tags every week. The largest tag is next week's work.
Look at your percentile as well as your marks. On Pareeksha everyone in a group takes the same fixed paper, so your percentile tells you where you stand against others on identical questions. See how it works.
8. Free and paid practice on Pareeksha
- Free: a 10-question mini-mock to try the format, and the Daily Dangal quiz.
- Pro: full Prelims-pattern mocks with sectional timers, previous-year papers and topic-wise practice. The IBPS Clerk series is listed under banking exams.
The mocks on the site cover the Prelims stage.
What this page does not have
- A target or "safe" score. IBPS has published no cut-off document we could open, and each State is a separate contest. See cut-offs.
- A topic-wise weightage chart. IBPS publishes none.
- Book recommendations. We do not name publishers.
- Dates for the next cycle. The plan is by phase because the next notification has not been issued.
Related: Syllabus · Exam pattern · Cut-offs