SBI PO Course 2026

SBI PO 2026: The Exam, Its Three Phases, and How to Score

SBI PO is three different examinations stacked on top of each other. The Preliminary is a one-hour speed filter whose marks are thrown away once it has done its job. The Main is a three-and-a-half-hour paper whose four objective tests carry very different marks per question and each carry their own qualifying hurdle, followed immediately by a typed writing paper. Phase III then tests you as a person rather than as an answer sheet. A candidate who prepares for 'SBI PO' as one undifferentiated syllabus wastes months. This chapter reads the official pattern line by line from the advertisement dated 18 June 2026 and the two Acquaint Yourself booklets SBI issued for it, and converts each rule into a decision you will actually make: how many seconds a question deserves, when a guess is worth marking, which section buys the most final-merit marks per hour of study, and what order to prepare the rest of this book in.

KarmSakha preparation topics covered

• Who may apply: the age band, the graduation condition and the number-of-chances rule in advertisement CRPD/PO/2026-27/09 — and the credit-history clause that a corrigendum later removed
• Phase I (Preliminary Examination): three separately timed sections, 100 questions, 100 marks, one hour, and no sectional cut-off
• Phase II (Main Examination): four separately timed objective tests for 200 marks in three hours, followed by a typed 30-mark Descriptive paper in 30 minutes
• Phase III: the Psychometric Test, the Group Exercise (20 marks) and the Interview (30 marks)
• Negative marking of one-fourth of the marks assigned to a question, what it costs per question in each Main test, and the rounding rule for a test's total penalty
• How the final merit list is built: Main Examination (230) converted to 75, Group Exercise and Interview (50) converted to 25
• A seconds-per-question budget, a marks-per-minute priority map and a phase-by-phase preparation plan tied to the chapters of this book

Read the Advertisement First: Where Every Pattern Fact Comes From

SBI recruits Probationary Officers through a detailed advertisement issued by its Central Recruitment & Promotion Department in Mumbai and published on the careers page of the Bank's website. For this edition the governing document is Advertisement No. CRPD/PO/2026-27/09, dated 18 June 2026. SBI later released two 'Acquaint Yourself' booklets for the same advertisement, one for the online Preliminary Examination and one for the online Main Examination. Every question count, mark, timing and penalty in this chapter is read from those three documents, and each figure below names which one it comes from. SBI can also amend an advertisement after it is issued by publishing a corrigendum on the same careers page; for this cycle, a corrigendum dated 1 July 2026 removed the advertisement's credit-history (CIBIL) clause. A corrigendum overrides the text it amends, so it must be read alongside the advertisement.

The reason to insist on the primary document is that the pattern is not permanent, and second-hand summaries lag behind it. The 2026 Descriptive paper is a good example: the advertisement calls it 'Communication Skills' and lists three tasks — an email, a situation analysis, and either a report or a précis. A candidate who prepared from a guide describing a different descriptive format would walk in having practised the wrong tasks. The fix costs five minutes: when a new cycle's advertisement appears, open Section 8, 'Selection Procedure', before you open any book, including this one.

Just as important is knowing what the advertisement does not tell you. It fixes the sections, the number of questions, the marks, the timings and the penalty. It does not tell you which question types will appear inside a section, how many of each, how hard they will be, or what the cut-offs will be — sectional and aggregate cut-offs are 'decided by the Bank' after the exam. Both booklets say plainly that their sample question types are 'only illustrative and not exhaustive' and warn that the real paper may contain harder questions and types not shown. So any statement about question-type frequency, anywhere, is orientation rather than a promise, and your preparation should cover every type a section can reasonably contain.

One more practical point: all objective questions in both phases carry five answer options, of which exactly one is correct. The practice questions in this book carry four options so that they fit the book's reader format; the elimination and guessing arithmetic later in this chapter is worked for the real five-option paper, because that is the one you will sit.

Eligibility Basics: Age, Graduation, Chances and Credit History

The advertisement invites online applications from eligible Indian citizens. The age band is not below 21 years and not above 30 years as on 1 April 2026 — that is, born not later than 1 April 2005 and not earlier than 2 April 1996, both days inclusive — with relaxation of the upper limit for reserved categories. Those relaxations are not cumulative: a candidate who falls under two relaxation heads gets the one that applies, not the sum. The relaxation figures are reproduced in the table below exactly as the advertisement dated 18 June 2026 prints them; certificates supporting any relaxation are checked at the Group Exercise and Interview stage, so a category claimed at registration must be one you can document later, and the advertisement states that no change of category is permitted after registration.

The academic condition is graduation in any discipline from a recognised university, or an equivalent qualification recognised by the Central Government. Professional degrees such as Medical, Engineering, Chartered Accountancy and Cost Accountancy are expressly eligible. Final-year or final-semester students may apply provisionally, but if called for interview they must prove that they passed on or before 30.09.2026, the date the advertisement fixes. The date of passing is the date on the mark sheet or provisional certificate, or, where results are posted online, the date certified by the university as the posting date — a detail that matters for anyone whose result is due close to the deadline.

The number-of-chances rule is the eligibility condition candidates most often misread. The advertisement caps attempts at six for UR and EWS candidates and nine for UR (PwBD), EWS (PwBD), OBC and OBC (PwBD) candidates, with no restriction for SC and ST candidates including PwBD. The crucial clause is what counts as a chance: appearing in the Main Examination counts; appearing only in the Preliminary Examination does not. In a year with a single written exam and no prelims, appearing in that exam counts. So a chance is consumed only when you sit a Main paper — which is a reason to take every Main exam you qualify for seriously, not a reason to skip one.

Finally, a lesson in reading the whole record. The advertisement as first published contained a credit-history clause: candidates with defaulted loan or credit-card dues reflected with CIBIL or another credit information company would have had to regularise them by the date of joining. SBI's corrigendum dated 1 July 2026 removed that clause 'with immediate effect' and left all other terms unchanged. A candidate or a guidebook that read only the original advertisement would still be describing a condition that no longer applies. For any future cycle, check the careers page for corrigenda until the recruitment ends, and treat the latest official text as the rule.

Phase I: The Preliminary Examination

The Preliminary Examination is an online objective test for 100 marks in one hour, divided into three sections with separate timings: English Language (40 questions, 20 minutes), Quantitative Aptitude (30 questions, 20 minutes) and Reasoning Ability (30 questions, 20 minutes). The advertisement prints the marks only as a combined 'Total Maximum Marks 100' across the three sections; since there are 100 questions, this book plans on the natural reading of one mark per question, and every prelims calculation below states that assumption. According to the Preliminary booklet, all questions except those in English Language are available in both English and Hindi, and no calculator — separate or in a watch — is allowed in the examination hall, so every prelims calculation is done mentally or on the rough sheet provided.

Separate timing is the rule that shapes prelims strategy. When a section's 20 minutes end, the section closes, and time you did not use there cannot be carried into the next. That removes the old tactic of racing through a strong section to bank minutes for a weak one. Each section is its own 20-minute contest, so your plan must say, section by section, how many questions you intend to attempt and in what order. The per-question clock is tight: 1,200 seconds for 40 English questions is 30 seconds each; 1,200 seconds for 30 Quant or Reasoning questions is 40 seconds each.

The second rule is that there is no sectional cut-off in the Preliminary Examination. A category-wise merit list is drawn on aggregate marks, and approximately ten times the number of vacancies in each category are shortlisted for the Main Examination from the top of that list. That makes prelims an aggregate game: a strong English score can carry a middling Quant score. It does not make any section safe to abandon, because every section still takes up a full, fixed 20 minutes, and marks left on the table in any of them are marks your competitors collected.

The third rule is the one candidates forget: the Preliminary marks are not added to the final merit list. They decide only whether you reach the Main Examination. That has a direct consequence for how much time prelims deserves. Prelims preparation should build the speed and accuracy base that the Main paper reuses — the same arithmetic, reasoning and English, at a faster clock — rather than being a separate syllabus studied for its own sake.

Phase II: The Main Examination and the Descriptive Paper