Nainital Bank PO common mistakes
Nainital Bank PO · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Spending more than about 25 seconds on a single Reasoning puzzle set (seating arrangement, floor puzzle, box puzzle) and then rushing the remaining 10 questions in that set, leaving 3-4 of them blank or guessed.
Candidates treat the first puzzle as a test of intelligence rather than a test of time allocation, and refuse to abandon a partially built arrangement because of sunk effort. In a 200-question, 2-hour paper, every minute overspent in Reasoning is stolen from Quant and English, where marks are cheaper.
What to do instead
Adopt a hard rule before the exam: if a puzzle set is not cracked within 6-7 minutes, mark it, move on, and return only after Section-wise attempts are complete. Practise with a visible timer, doing 5 sets in 30 minutes, and deliberately abandon one set mid-way each session to build the habit of walking away. Track how many marks you recover from the abandoned set later versus what you would have lost.
Attempting all 50 Reasoning questions in strict serial order, so the last 15 (often the easiest, e.g. number series, coding-decoding, syllogism) are never reached before time expires.
Numbered question papers create a psychological pull to go in order, and candidates do not know their own strength profile well enough to reorder. The paper is not difficulty-ordered, so serial attempts waste early minutes on hard puzzles while easy marks sit at the end.
What to do instead
Before the exam, record your accuracy and average time per question type across 5-6 mocks, and write a personal attempt order on the rough sheet in the first 60 seconds (e.g. syllogism, inequality, coding-decoding, series, then puzzles). In mocks, enforce that order for at least 3 full attempts so it becomes automatic.
Reading the full passage twice in Reading Comprehension because the first read produced no mental map of paragraph functions, then answering detail questions by re-scanning the entire passage each time.
Candidates read RC as if it were general reading, without noting the author's stance, transition words, and where each idea sits. With 4-5 RC passages and roughly 15-20 minutes available for them, two full reads consume the entire budget.
What to do instead
Practise a single 3-minute read in which you mark paragraph purpose in 3-5 words each (e.g. 'claim', 'counterexample', 'author's conclusion'). Answer vocabulary and tone questions first from memory, then do detail questions by locating the keyword rather than re-reading. Do 2 passages per day for two weeks with a stopwatch and log read time versus solve time.
Treating cloze tests and fill-in-the-blank grammar items as intuition questions, choosing the option that 'sounds right' without checking subject-verb agreement, preposition collocation, or parallel structure.
Everyday spoken English tolerates errors that the exam marks wrong, and candidates underestimate how many items turn on a single fixed collocation (e.g. 'comply with', 'averse to'). Speed pressure makes the ear override the rule.
What to do instead
Before choosing, run a three-check drill on every blank: (a) does the verb agree with its subject, (b) does the preposition match the word it follows, (c) is the structure parallel with the surrounding list. Build a one-page personal list of 40 high-frequency collocations and revise it weekly. In mocks, re-do every wrong grammar item and write the rule violated beside it.
Losing marks in para-jumbles and sentence-rearrangement by starting from the sentence that 'feels like an introduction' rather than from the sentence containing an unavoidable opener cue (a pronoun with no antecedent, a definite article, or a contrast connector).
Candidates look for a topic sentence by content, but exam jumbles are constructed so that the logical opener is identified by grammar, not by subject matter. Under time pressure, the content-first approach produces confident but wrong sequences.
What to do instead
Use a fixed protocol: circle every pronoun, article, and connector in all sentences; the sentence with no backward reference is the opener; the sentence with 'however/but' must follow the one it contradicts. Practise 10 jumbles a day for a week using only this cue-based method, and verify by checking that the resulting sequence has no dangling references.
In Data Interpretation, computing every value exactly (long division, full percentages) for all five questions in a set instead of approximating and eliminating options.
School habit rewards exact computation, and candidates distrust approximation. But DI options are usually spaced widely enough that a rounded calculation identifies the answer, and exact arithmetic on 4-5 questions can consume 8-10 minutes for 5 marks.
What to do instead
Force approximation: round every figure to two significant digits, compute, and compare with option gaps. Only do exact arithmetic when two options fall within 2-3% of your estimate. In practice, time each DI set at 4 minutes for 5 questions and review any set where you exceeded it to see which exact calculations were unnecessary.
Choosing the arithmetic topic to attempt by personal preference rather than by marks-per-minute, so time goes to a 3-question DI set while 6 standalone simplification and approximation questions are left unattempted.
Candidates equate 'important topic' with 'topic I have studied most', and simplification/approximation feels too trivial to prioritise. In reality these are the fastest marks in the Quant section and are frequently the difference between a sectional cut-off miss and a clear.
What to do instead
Build a marks-per-minute table from mock data for each topic (simplification, approximation, number series, quadratic comparison, DI, arithmetic word problems) and attempt in descending order of that ratio. Reserve the last 8-10 minutes of Quant for arithmetic word problems only after the fast topics are exhausted.
Leaving the arithmetic word-problem questions (time-work, trains, mixtures, partnership) blank entirely because the candidate 'never gets them', instead of learning the 6-8 standard models that cover most of them.
Word problems look infinitely varied, so candidates conclude the topic is unlearnable and reallocate all study time to puzzles. The exam, however, reuses a small set of structures (efficiency ratios, relative speed, alligation, successive percentage change) with different numbers.
What to do instead
Identify the recurring models from past papers and mocks, and for each write a one-line template (e.g. time-work: convert to units of work per day, then use efficiency ratio directly). Solve 15 questions per model with the template in front of you, then 10 without it. Target 60% accuracy on these before the exam rather than 0%.
Preparing General Awareness by reading a monthly current-affairs magazine cover to cover without separating banking-awareness facts (policy rates, RBI functions, regulator roles, financial inclusion schemes, bank headquarters and taglines) from general current affairs.
Candidates assume awareness is a memory lottery and volume of reading equals marks. The banking-industry section, however, rewards structured knowledge of a bounded syllabus (RBI monetary policy tools, types of accounts, NBFCs, payment systems, Basel norms, financial regulators), which can be revised systematically.
What to do instead
Maintain two separate revision sheets: one for static banking knowledge organised by regulator and instrument, one for current affairs limited to the last 6-8 months and tagged by theme (appointments, schemes, indices, awards, sports). Revise the banking sheet weekly and test yourself with 25-question quizzes rather than re-reading notes.
Guessing on General Awareness questions with negative marking by eliminating nothing and answering every unknown, converting a small knowledge gap into a large net loss.
Candidates believe awareness questions are pure recall and that any guess has a 25% chance, ignoring that a considered guess after eliminating two absurd options is far better than a blind one, and that a blind guess at 25% accuracy loses marks under a 0.25 penalty.
What to do instead
Apply a guessing rule: answer only if you can eliminate at least two options or recall a related fact; otherwise leave it. Practise with sectional mocks that report net score, and compute your break-even accuracy (20% for four options with 0.25 negative marking) so the rule is grounded in arithmetic rather than instinct.