The State Bank Of India successfully conducted another slot of the Probationary Officer Preliminary Examination 2017 on May 6 and 7. And, with this, the first phase of examination is now over.
Several students at an examination centre said the pattern of the question paper was same as it was on April 29. But students faced a lot of difficulty due to nervousness and excitement.
As there was no change in the pattern, so the level remained moderate and attempts were on a bit high side. Students were satisfied with their performance and, in fact, many managed to cross 60 attempts.
We have seen that the SBI has kept the cut-offs low for past few years and we are sure that this time as well, it will be somewhere around 50 marks.
This was an easy section. If we talk in terms of the level of difficulty then the paper was not tough at all. The trick was to solve data interpretation, simplification, quadratic and series first and then move on to the miscellaneous portion. One could easily attempt the questions if they had practised well. DI was based on Line Graph and Table.
Exam analysis: English (Easy-Moderate)
The English section was a bit of a relief. Students were relieved to see that 10 Ka Dum continued in this slot as well. One just needed to pick the right topic to easily score good marks. We are sure that students will score well if they have even read the reading comprehension and can easily score well in Cloze test. Cloze test was with a little twist where a word was given in front of the blank and asked if it was appropriate and then select option (e) otherwise select the appropriate one from the rest of the 4 options. There was one new topic of phrase replacement and was not so difficult. There were 3-4 vocabulary questions in reading comprehension.
Exam analysis: Reasoning (Easy-Moderate)
This section was dominated by puzzles once again. We are not saying that the puzzles were easy, but doing it within a limited time was really a tedious task. But the SBI gave some escape points through which one could have cleared the reasoning section. Inequalities, direction dense, blood relation, order and ranking and coding-decoding were the escape routes.
