The analysis of IBPS Clerk 2018 Prelim exam held on 8th Dec 2018 (Slot 1) is presented below. Similar to the recently conducted IBPS PO Prelim, SBI PO and Clerk prelim exams, the structure of this exam presented a 20-minute per section time limit, and no navigability between any section.

Snapshot of the Exam:

No of choices per question - 5

Negative marking – 0.25 of the marks assigned to each question

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

While no changes were observed in the prescribed pattern of the exam, a few changes worth noting are:

• Introduction of a sectional time limit, which is similar to the one presented in IBPS PO 2018, SBI PO and Clerk 2018 Prelim examinations.
• A question type that required matching the clauses given in two different columns to form grammatically and logically coherent sentence. This was a replication of a similar pattern observed in the SBI Clerk Prelim and IBPS PO Prelim exams this year.
• No questions on Symbols Notations, Blood Relations and Coding-Decoding.

Numerical Ability:

According to the feedback received from students who appeared for this exam, this section did not throw up any surprise and can be rated as ‘easy to moderate’.

The 10 questions on Simplifications were easy. There were 5 questions each on Data Interpretation (Table) and Quadratic Comparisons which were also doable.

There were 5 questions on Number series that can be rated between easy to moderate. Individual questions in this section were 10 in number and pertained to – Ages, Percentages, Profit & Loss, Time & Work, Time & Distance, Simple Interest, and Mensuration etc.. These were a combination of easy and moderate.

A student could therefore, solve around 22 to 25 questions in approximately 20 minutes provided he chose judiciously.

Reasoning:

This section has also been tagged as 'Easy to Moderate'.

In this slot, there were 3 to 4 questions on Deductions. There were no questions asked from Coding – Decoding, Symbol-Notation and Blood Relations. There were 2 – 3 questions on Direction Sense.

There were 4 puzzles, one each on Linear arrangements (12 persons facing North and South), Square Arrangement (8 people; people sitting at the corners facing outside and people sitting at the middle facing outside, Distribution (7 people and 7 cities), Days based puzzle and Comparison of heights puzzle. Puzzles were easy to moderate but lengthier than other questions in the same section.

Thus, almost 23 to 25 questions could possibly be solved in about 20 minutes in this section.

The topic -wise split, as per feedback received from our students, is as given below:

English Language:

This section too was predictable and hovered between easy to moderate.

• The lone Reading Comprehension passage on ‘Telecommunications’ was conventional in its presentation, and 6 questions were posed from it.
• There were 5 questions on Phrase Replacement where a sentence with one part in bold font was to be replaced with the correct choice from among the five given.
• There were 5 questions on pairing of clauses to form a grammatically and logically correct sentence.
• The 5 questions on Para Formation had 5 sentences in jumbled order and need to be sequentially arranged to form a meaningful paragraph.
• There were 4 - 5 questions on single blank fillers which were easy to attempt.
• The questions on spell-error correction was presented as a sentence with four words in bold, of which one was erroneously spelt,

We can deduce that about 20 - 22 questions could possibly be solved in the given 20 minutes in the English section. The break-up of the questions is as follows:

Over all, the difficulty level of the paper in this particular slot can be pegged between Easy to Moderate.

Good Attempts: