A banking aspirant does not sit one exam. Between August and the following January they sit four or five, from three different recruiters, with overlapping syllabuses and non-overlapping dates. Most people prepare for whichever paper is next, and arrive at each one about three weeks underdone.
The season rewards the opposite approach: prepare the common spine continuously, and treat each exam as a two-week sharpening of something you have been building all along.
The season on one page
| Exam | Preliminary | Main |
|---|---|---|
| IBPS PO / MT (CRP PO/MT-XVI) | 22 and 23 August 2026 | 4 October 2026 |
| IBPS Specialist Officer (CRP SPL-XVI) | 29 August 2026 | 1 November 2026 |
| IBPS Clerk (CRP CSA-XVI) | 10 and 11 October 2026 | 27 December 2026 |
| IBPS RRB Officer Scale I | 21 and 22 November 2026 | 20 December 2026 |
| IBPS RRB Officer Scale II and III | — | 20 December 2026 |
| IBPS RRB Office Assistant | 6, 12 and 13 December 2026 | 30 January 2027 |
Source: the IBPS tentative calendar of online CRP for PSBs and RRBs 2026-2027, dated 16 January 2026. IBPS states it may change any date for administrative reasons, so check ibps.in before you build a plan around them. SBI recruits separately on its own calendar — see the SBI Clerk and SBI PO plans.
The paper, and what it forces
IBPS Clerk is the clearest example of the shape all of these share.
Preliminary — 100 marks in 60 minutes, each test separately timed
| Test | Questions | Marks | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| English Language | 30 | 30 | 20 minutes |
| Numerical Ability | 35 | 35 | 20 minutes |
| Reasoning Ability | 35 | 35 | 20 minutes |
Main — 200 marks in 125 minutes, each test separately timed
| Test | Questions | Marks | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| General / Financial Awareness | 40 | 50 | 20 minutes |
| General English | 40 | 40 | 35 minutes |
| Reasoning Ability | 40 | 60 | 35 minutes |
| Quantitative Aptitude | 40 | 50 | 35 minutes |
Source: the CRP CSA-XVI notification published by IBPS.
Two lines in that notification decide how you should prepare. The tests are separately timed — twenty minutes for Numerical Ability whether you are ready or not, with no way to borrow from English. And candidates have to qualify in each of the three tests by clearing cut-offs set by IBPS. A weak section in a banking preliminary is not expensive; it is disqualifying.
So sectional practice is not a refinement here, it is the whole game. Practise 35 questions against a 20-minute clock, one section at a time, and know your own attempt count and accuracy for each.
The highest-paid twenty minutes in the exam
Look again at the Main table. General and Financial Awareness is 50 marks in 20 minutes — 2.5 marks a minute, against 1.7 for Reasoning and 1.4 for Quantitative Aptitude. It is almost entirely recall: you either know the RBI's latest policy rate or you do not, and no amount of time in the hall will produce it.
It is also the section that candidates push to the last three weeks, where it competes with everything else. Give it fifteen minutes a day from the first week of the season — current affairs, banking awareness, and the schemes and appointments that come up every year — and it becomes the cheapest fifty marks you will ever bank.
What a wrong answer costs
A quarter of the question's marks, and nothing at all for a blank. That asymmetry is worth doing the arithmetic on. In a 35-question section marked at one mark each:
- 28 attempts at 95% accuracy: 26.6 right, 1.4 wrong, 26.25 marks.
- All 35 attempted at 80%: 28 right, 7 wrong, 26.25 marks — exactly the same.
- All 35 attempted at 75%: 26.25 right, 8.75 wrong, 24.06 marks.
So filling the paper only pays while your accuracy holds above about 80%, and below that it actively costs you. Find your own break-even in mocks rather than deciding it in the hall.
A season plan
| Phase | What you are doing |
|---|---|
| Base (any month with no exam in it) | The full syllabus of Reasoning, Numerical and English, topic by topic, each finished with a timed set. Fifteen minutes of current affairs daily, without fail. |
| Four weeks out from a Prelims | Sectional practice at exam pace every day. Two full mocks a week. No new topics. |
| The last week before a Prelims | Sectional sets, previous-year papers, and the topics your mock analysis flagged. Sleep on exam time. |
| Between a Prelims and its Main | Six to eight weeks, usually. This is General and Financial Awareness season, plus data interpretation and the descriptive paper where one applies. |
| After a result | Straight back to base. The next exam is six weeks away and the syllabus has not changed. |
Daily timetables
2.5 hours: working candidate
| Block | Session | What you do |
|---|---|---|
| 40 min | Quant or DI | One topic, then a timed set of 15 |
| 35 min | Reasoning | Puzzles and seating arrangement — the two that decide the section |
| 25 min | English | Reading comprehension one day, grammar and cloze the next |
| 15 min | Current affairs | The day's digest, plus banking awareness |
| 15 min | Revision | Whatever the spaced schedule says is due |
5 hours: full-time candidate
Two Quant blocks, a full sectional set every evening at exam pace, and one full-length mock every third day — with the following morning spent on its analysis rather than on the next mock.
What usually goes wrong
- Preparing for the next paper instead of the season. Each exam gets three panicked weeks and the common syllabus never compounds.
- A weak section left weak. In a separately timed prelims with a cut-off in every test, one weak section ends the attempt regardless of the other two.
- Current affairs treated as a revision subject. It is a daily habit subject. Started late, it costs fifty marks in every Main.
- Mocks taken for the score. The score is not the product; the list of what went wrong and why is.
- Guessing to fill the paper. Blanks are free. Wrong answers are not.
How the free planner turns this into today's sessions
- A plan from your exam and its date. Pick IBPS PO, Clerk, SO, an RRB paper, SBI or RBI, set the date, and the AI builds a daily routine across Reasoning, Quantitative Ability, English and General Awareness, weighted by what recent papers ask.
- Timed sessions, not a checklist. Each session carries a topic and a duration; the timer keeps running when your phone locks, and on Android Focus Shield silences the phone while a session runs.
- Mock tests on the real pattern, with sectional timing. Before you start, the paper shows each section, its marks, its negative marking and its sectional lock — the same constraint the real prelims imposes. Your first test is free.
- Daily current affairs, built in. The day's digest with exam-angle notes and practice questions, so the fifteen-minute habit has somewhere to happen.
- Spaced revision that escalates. Topics come back on a schedule with a harder question each time, which is what keeps August's work alive for December's Main.
- A plan that shrinks instead of breaking. Fall behind for several days and it offers to resize the routine to what your best days show you can sustain, pausing sessions rather than deleting them.
Start with today
Set your next banking exam and its date from the table above, and the first session is ready. If your Prelims is inside a month, skip the base phase: sectional sets at exam pace, two mocks a week analysed properly, and fifteen minutes of current affairs every single day.