SBI Clerk Exam Pattern 2026: Negative Marking, Normalisation, Prelims, Main

The SBI Junior Associate exam has been identical for four cycles: a one-hour prelims that only shortlists, a Main that decides the merit list on its own, and a local language test for those who need it. There is no interview. Two details are widely missed: the prelims has no minimum qualifying marks at all, and in the Main one test carries 60 marks for 50 questions, so its penalty per wrong answer is higher. SBI’s own Junior Associate careers page still describes an older pattern with an interview; the advertisement governs.

SBI advertisement CRPD/CR/2026-27/17.

Because each section has its own 20-minute clock, time cannot be borrowed from English to spend on numerical ability. And because there is no minimum, the prelims is a pure ranking: SBI calls about ten times the vacancies in each state and category to the Main, in descending order of the aggregate. Prelims marks are not added to the final merit.

SBI deducts a quarter of the marks assigned to a question for each wrong answer, in both the prelims and the Main. That is 0.25 for every 1-mark question and 0.30 in Reasoning & Computer Aptitude, where a question is worth 1.2 marks (our arithmetic). The Main booklet adds a rule that changes small numbers: “If the total of the penalty for test is in fraction, it will be rounded off to the nearest integer.” The penalty is totalled for each test and then rounded, so one wrong answer (0.25) rounds to zero, while three (0.75) round to one. SBI does not say how an exact .5 is rounded.

Note where the rounding sentence is printed: in the Main “Acquaint Yourself” booklet (November 2025). The prelims booklet we could read — the 2026-27 special drive’s — says only that a quarter of the marks is deducted per wrong answer and prints no rounding rule. The advertisement is the same. We therefore apply rounding to the Main only; SBI has not said whether the prelims works the same way.

Many coaching pages still describe the exam from SBI’s “Junior Associate” careers page, which is the first result for many searches. That page describes an older recruitment — it even says age-relaxation certificates are produced “at the time of interview”. Where it and the 2026-27 advertisement disagree, the advertisement governs; it is the document the recruitment runs on.

The prelims runs over several days — 26 and 27 September 2026 this year — so candidates in different sessions answer different questions. We searched every Junior Associate advertisement from 2023-24 to 2026-27, the November 2025 Main booklet and the prelims booklets for any statement on normalising or equating scores across sessions, and for a tie-break rule. We found neither. SBI’s PO advertisement (CRPD/PO/2026-27/09), by contrast, ranks candidates tied at the cut-off by age, older first; the Junior Associate advertisement contains no such clause. So any page that tells you how SBI Clerk scores are normalised, or who wins a tie, is going beyond what SBI has published.

With five options and a penalty of a quarter, a blind guess on a 1-mark question has an expected value of zero: one chance in five of +1, four in five of −0.25. Ruling out even one option makes a guess positive (+0.06), and ruling out two makes it clearly worthwhile (+0.17) — our arithmetic. The Main booklet confirms the five options: “There are five alternative answers to every question”. The rounding rule makes the first wrong answer in a Main test cost nothing (0.25 or 0.30 rounds to zero); a second costs nothing only if an exact 0.5 is rounded down in a 1-mark test, which SBI does not say, and in Reasoning & Computer Aptitude two wrong answers (0.60) already round to 1. That is a side effect, not a strategy; accuracy still wins over volume.