IBPS Clerk Mains 2026: 160 Questions in 125 Minutes, What Changed

Each test is separately timed: when a test’s time ends, the next one opens, and unused minutes do not carry over. The notification lists the tests as “not by sequence”, so the order on the day may differ. General English is set in English only; the other three tests are available in English, Hindi and the languages listed for your State/UT.

At the venue, the CSA-XVI notification says to expect about three hours or more for the 125-minute Mains, including verification and instructions. The same notification says candidates called for the Mains must bring the authenticated/stamped Prelims call letter and a stamped copy of their ID proof, as well as the Mains call letter and the original photo ID. Follow the CSA-XVI Mains call letter if it adds anything.

Three of the four Mains tests carry more marks than questions, which means some questions are worth two marks. The CSA-XV Mains handout printed the split as Section A (two marks each) and Section B (one mark each). The CSA-XVI notification prints only the totals for each test. Unless the CSA-XVI handout says otherwise, the splits below are the ones to expect for General Awareness and Reasoning.

The Quant inference is simple arithmetic. If every question is worth either one or two marks, 40 questions totalling 50 marks means 10 two-mark questions and 30 one-mark questions; no other 1-and-2 combination adds up. If IBPS instead gives every Quant question the same weight, each would be worth 1.25 marks, and other structures are possible too. The calculator below lets you switch between the first two. If IBPS keeps a 1-mark/2-mark structure, Quant would have 10 two-mark questions against 15 in CSA-XV, and the marks would be spread more thinly across more questions; if it uses equal weights or another structure, that comparison does not apply.

The notification says that for each wrong answer “one fourth or 0.25 of the marks assigned to that question” is deducted. Read that carefully: the penalty follows the question’s value. A wrong answer on a two-mark question costs 0.50, not 0.25. A blank answer costs nothing. The CSA-XV handouts say every question has five options.

With five options and a quarter-mark penalty, a pure guess is worth exactly nothing on average: a one-in-five chance of the full marks against a four-in-five chance of losing a quarter of them (our arithmetic). Ruling out even one option tips the average slightly positive. That is not an instruction to guess; it is why the penalty is not a reason to leave a question you can narrow down.

IBPS requires “a minimum score in each test of Online Main Examination and also a minimum total score”. You cannot write off General/Financial Awareness and make it up in Reasoning. The minimums are set by IBPS after the exam and are not published in advance. Only the Mains counts for merit: the Prelims is a qualifying step, and the Mains total out of 200 is converted to a score out of 100 for allotment. There is no interview.

Scores are normalised when the exam runs in more than one session, using the equi-percentile method, and IBPS keeps two decimal places. IBPS has also published “normated standards” for flagging non-genuine scores.

Quant gets five extra questions and five extra minutes, so the time per question barely moves: from about 51.4 seconds to 52.5 (our arithmetic). What changes is endurance. The Quant test is now as long as English and Reasoning, and the total paper is five minutes longer. General Awareness is still the fastest test at 30 seconds a question, which suits recall but punishes hesitation.

Candidates must clear a cut-off in each of the three Prelims tests, set by IBPS; an adequate number in each category, as IBPS decides, is shortlisted for the Mains. The Prelims is on 10 and 11 October 2026 and IBPS says to expect about two hours or more at the venue.

The Mains is about eleven weeks after the Prelims (our arithmetic). General/Financial Awareness is tested only in the Mains, which is why many candidates start it late; it is also the test with the least time per question, so it rewards material you have already revised rather than worked out on the day. The planner below splits your hours by each test’s share of the 200 marks.