The analysis of the IBPS PO 2018 Prelim exam held on the 13th of October 2018 (Slot 2) has been presented below. Similar to the recently conducted SBI PO and Clerk prelim exams, the structure of even this exam presented a sectional time limit, no navigability between any section, and each section time bound for 20 minutes.

Snapshot of the Exam:

No of choices per question – 5

Negative marking: 0.25 of the marks assigned to each question

As per feedback received from our students who appeared for this exam, the exam can be rated as moderate. Although no major changes were reported in the prescribed pattern of the exam, a few changes worth noting are:

• Introduction of a sectional time limit;
• Modified Grammar question
• Matching the Clauses given in two different columns to form grammatically and logically coherent sentence.

The section wise analysis of the above mentioned session, as reported by our students, is given below:

Quantitative Aptitude:

This section can be rated as moderate and was time consuming. No new question types / pattern of questions were asked in this slot of the exam.

There was no question on Simplifications, Approximations, Data Sufficiency and Data Comparison.

There were 15 to 18 questions (3 sets) on Data Interpretation (5-6 questions each on Line Graph, Table and Caselet). Questions were lengthy and calculation based. There were 5 questions on Wrong number series and 6 questions on Quadratic Comparisons. Questions on Quadratic comparisons were easy to moderate to solve whereas questions on Wrong number series were moderate in nature.

Individual questions were 7 to 8 in number. These were a combination of easy, moderate and difficult ones.

A student could therefore, have solved around 16 - 18 questions in 20 minutes, if he chose judiciously.

Reasoning:

This section has been given a 'Moderate' tag.

There were 20 questions on Puzzles (Linear with quant based reasoning, Square, Quant based Reasoning + Ages, Box puzzle), which were of moderate level of difficulty and time consuming. There were five questions on Symbols and Notations and 3 to 4 questions on Blood Relations. These questions ranged from easy to moderate. The three questions on Data Sufficiency were moderate and time-consuming.

About 18 to 20 questions could possibly be solved in 20 minutes. The topic -wise split, as reported by our students, is as given below.

English Language :

This section has been tagged as 'Moderate’ by our students.

• The lone Reading Comprehension passage was conventional in its presentation, and comprised 7 to 8 questions, of which 2 were vocab questions.

• There were 5 questions on the Error Identification (Word Usage) pattern. One sentence with four to five words in bold was given, and the aspirant was expected to pick the contextually inappropriate word from among them.
• There were 4 to 5 questions on Word Replacement and 2 to 3 questions on word usage.
• There were 5 questions on pairing of clauses to form grammatically and logically correct sentence.

Thus, about 15-17 questions could possibly be solved in 20 minutes in the English section. The break-up of the questions is as follows:

Over all, the paper was a combination of easy, moderate and difficult questions across all the three sections and can hence be rated as 'Moderate'.

Good Attempts and Expected Cutoffs: