IBPS Clerk Exam 2015: Syllabus and Preparation Tips for Reasoning

Indian Banking Personnel Selection is the body which recruits the aspiring candidates to work on various banking posts of clerical grade and probationary officers every year. Like every year they have invited applicants to apply for clerical posts in various nationalized participant banks around India. IBPS would conduct Prelims and Mains written examination and aspiring candidates who would get through to these written examinations would be called for personal interview where there final selection would be made. The selection of the candidates were previously done based on one written examination and personal interview, but due to huge number of applications and increasing number of applicants the recruitment body has decided to filter the candidates for each round.

The preliminary examination would carry three papers namely English Language, Reasoning Ability and Quantitative Ability. Reasoning Ability and Quantitative Ability papers would contain 35 questions each and consequently 35 marks along with them. The English Language paper would contain 30 questions making the total number of questions 100. The candidates would need to solve these questions in one hour time, which requires quite a good amount of preparation and time management in part of the candidates.

Syllabus for Reasoning: Although IBPS does not provide syllabus, Jagranjosh has come up with topics to be prepared for IBPS Clerk Exam 2015.

The topics list:

Verbal Reasoning: This part covers following topics:

• Analogy
• Classification
• Word formation
• Statement and conclusions
• Syllogism
• Statement and assumptions
• Statement and arguments
• Coding Decoding
• Blood Relations
• Passage and conclusions
• Alphabet test
• Series Test
• Number, Ranking and time sequence
• Direction sense Test
• Decision making test
• Figure series
• Input/output, Assertion and reasoning
• Sitting Arrangement

Non-Verbal Reasoning:

• Series test
• Odd figure Out
• Analogy
• Miscellaneous Test etc.

Preparation Tips:

• Practice questions in regular basis: The paper itself is quite a tricky one and could make or break the chances of candidates selected through to the next round of selections. There are questions related to analogy, statements, conclusions, assumptions, statement and arguments that need reasoning capability of the candidates and this can only develop over time and constant practice.
• Follow the previous year questions: If you need to follow previous year questions the most for any paper, it is reasoning ability. This would give you the exact idea of how the questions are framed in question papers year after year. The questions pertaining to coding-decoding, blood relations, alphabet tests, series tests, number and time sequence, direction sense test are most common ones that re-appear in exams after exams in various forms.
• Use your commonsense: While you are answering the questions during the examination rely heavily on your guts and senses. There might be questions that would certainly test your patience and reasoning capability. You just need to ignore questions that are dragging you for quite some time and move onto more known question instead. This would save enormous time as well as your opportunity to solve more questions.
• Follow books and magazines: Following books and magazines dedicated to examination preparation and carrying mock tests and drill questions prepares the candidates for the actual examination. You can actually solve the questions in the mock paper by keeping a stopwatch near you and clock your time of solving the questions for better training of yours.
• Try to divide your time equally: The preliminary examination can only be passed if a candidates passes individually in each of the paper by scoring the cut off marks. Hence the candidates need to keep this in mind that while preparing they need to give emphasis on each of the papers instead of giving priority to one. A better management of your time is very crucial in order to get success and going forward in the selection procedure.