If your SBI PO prelims mock has 30 English questions and 35 each in quant and reasoning, check which year it represents. The 2026 recruitment uses a different split.
Checked 20 September 2026, advertisement CRPD/PO/2026-27/09: English has 40 questions, quantitative aptitude 30 and reasoning 30. Each section has 20 minutes. The paper totals 100 marks, and SBI does not prescribe a sectional cutoff for prelims. See the official 2026 prelims information handout.
No sectional cutoff does not make an entire section disposable. The aggregate still comes from the paper you actually attempt.
Give English the right practice load
Forty questions in a short section make reading efficiency useful. Practise understanding the instruction before scanning the options. Is the question asking for a correct sentence, an error or the option that cannot fit? A fast answer to the wrong instruction wastes the effort.
Try alternating short-question drills with passage work. For a passage, write its central point after reading it once. If you cannot do that, another hundred vocabulary cards may not fix the main issue. Work on following the argument and locating evidence.
Review the options you rejected, too. A distractor often borrows wording from the passage while changing its meaning. Learning to spot that change helps more than memorising the answer letter.
Make quant and reasoning selection visible
In quant, start a question only when you can see a plausible method. Write the units before performing a calculation. For a set, inspect the information and the questions together before committing to every part.
In reasoning, keep diagrams legible and avoid mixing separate possibilities on one sketch. If the set branches repeatedly, label the cases. When you leave it, note enough information to return without reconstructing everything.
In your next mock, record the two questions that consumed the most unproductive time. Reattempt them later and decide whether you should have solved faster, selected a different method or left earlier. The answer differs by question.
Use a small timing experiment
For training, try a first pass through accessible questions, a second pass for selected returns and a short final check of saved responses. Measure how long those passes take before deciding the ideal split for you.
Do not chase an advertised “safe attempt” number. It ignores the paper's difficulty, your accuracy and the quality of your choices. Compare several correctly formatted mocks instead of treating one unusually high score as proof of readiness.
The banking negative-marking guide shows how extra attempts can reduce a score when accuracy falls. Use its examples to understand the arithmetic, then follow the current paper's scoring instructions.
Move forward with the right material
The 2026 SBI careers page already lists prelims results and mains call-letter material as checked on the date above; use the official recruitment listing for your stage. For future-cycle preparation, treat this as the verified 2026 pattern until a new notice confirms the next one.
Our SBI PO descriptive guide covers the writing work that should start alongside your broader mains preparation.