My strategy for clearing RBI Grade B 2022: How to Prepare?
Hello everyone, I am Aashay Biyani. I cleared RBI Grade B 2022 and this was my first attempt. During my preparation, there were several important lessons I learnt. I also felt there’s no concise blog by selected candidates of RBI for preparation strategy and guidance. All we get is a few answers on Quora.
While the guidance and strategy provided by various coaching institutes is definitely enough, I feel that’s a bit of an overkill. Through this blog, I intend to share the lessons that I learnt during my preparation.
Before we begin, just a disclaimer: The strategy provided worked for me. That is not a guarantee that it will work for everyone. This is also just one of the many strategies that has resulted in success.
First Things First…
I want it to be perfectly clear that I had joined a coaching, the name of which I will not mention in this blog. To be fair, there are a few coachings in the market, and almost all of them are good enough. Just select any, based on your criterion. In the month of April 2022, I decided to pursue RBI Grade B. The preliminary examination was in May 2022 and Mains in June 2022. On going through the syllabus, I felt that I definitely had enough time to cover the syllabus, but not enough to figure out what to read from where. As a result, I joined one particular coaching institute, and there’s no doubt that I was greatly helped by it. I am also certain that whichever coaching you join, you’ll find some equivalent of the material I am referring to there as well.
However, please note here, and this is very important, that since I did not have much time, I only studied from coaching notes for the second phase of the exam, which is a very problematic strategy. The second phase gives a lot of weightage to answer writing, and for writing good answers, one needs good content. Good content can’t be prepared by simply going through the notes. It is now my humble opinion that notes should only be used for revision. I am not suggesting that you could not clear this exam by only reading notes. I did that. I am just saying that it’s too risky and if possible, avoid that risk.
With these facts aside, let’s start with the journey. Also, this blog doesn’t cover the basics, i.e., the exam pattern, subjects, etc. You can find enough material on that over the internet.
Prelims
There are four subjects asked in preliminary examination: Quantitative Aptitude(Q), Reasoning(R), English (E) and General Awareness (GA). While all the subjects are important, GA has the highest and deciding weightage among the four. For GA, current affairs (CA) of past 3 months are a must to read. I read from the current affairs magazine provided by the coaching, but I have met candidates who have read from Affairs Cloud. While coaching institutes typically recommend going through past six months of current affairs, the pattern at this point requires you to necessarily go through the past 3 months. So for example, if exam was in May, CA of March, April and May (till 5–10 days before exam) is must. As coaching institutes and mentors recommend to go through at least 6 months of CA, I went to the exam prepared with six months worth of current affairs, and only in exam did I realize that the weightage for the past three months was much higher. For this, coachings also runs marathon sessions for each month with 100s of questions of CA on YouTube. I didn’t attend the live sessions, but I later watched and re-watched at 2x, and this was a gamechanger for me.
I had earlier appeared for CAT and had secured greater than 99 percentile, so I only needed to practice the QRE sections and my strategy in these wouldn’t be very helpful.
Prelims Test Series
Test series are very important for any exam, as they reflect your current level of preparedness and also, your strengths and weaknesses are very clearly captured through these. As I had joined a coaching institute, I had its test series. However, I realized that the questions being asked were only from its current affairs magazine and they were not completely reflective of the question paper. So I joined another test series for prelims and mains. Now I think that the test series of Olive Board was better.
Mains
There are three subjects in Mains Examination: Economic and Social Issues (ESI), General Finance and Management (FnM), and English. I started to prepare for this only after the results of Prelims were announced. Though I had watched a lot of videos in the month of April itself, before starting preparation for prelims, I did not remember any of the material by June. My graduation is in economics and I have cleared CFA level 1. Needless to say, I already had a good understanding of Economics and Finance. Still, there were a lot of things that I had to read and mug up. Management was completely new to me, and I also found it very interesting. My strategy for mains was fairly simple and straightforward: I followed the syllabus to the point. I didn’t read anything that wasn’t mentioned in the syllabus and I didn’t leave anything that was mentioned in the syllabus. I realized that had I followed that strategy right from the beginning, my syllabus would’ve been completed much faster in April itself. I can copy paste the syllabus of each subject and mention where I studied each topic from. However, that exercise would be futile, as I completed most of my syllabus from the coaching institute. There were hardly 1–2 topics for which I wasn’t satisfied with the content provided by it and I simply googled them to find the relevant content. I am, therefore, just mentioning the important things that one needs to keep in mind for each paper.
Economic and Social Issues (ESI)
Other than the covering topics of the syllabus, government schemes are of paramount importance for this paper. Coaching institutes generally provide a document for government schemes. You may also find some of such documents available free of cost. I read the document and later revised it twice. And this exercise did help. In the objective part of this paper, there were two sets (around 10 questions) from government schemes. Also, past three months current affairs magazine for ESI paper provided by the coaching was really helpful for this paper. Again, I think you can find such magazines from their telegram channels (at least it was available while I was studying).
General Finance and Management (FnM)
There were not very specific things in FnM. The coaching provided Finance Numerical material for this paper, which is not there in the syllabus, and therefore, I didn’t study any of it. Secondly, the past three months of a FnM specific magazine provided by the coachign was really helpful for this paper.
English
English is a low hanging fruit, and should not be ignored. I practiced writing a few essays. Channels of coaching institutes provide a list of topics that they expect can come as essay in English paper on their YouTube channels. One such video provided a list of 20 topics, and I prepared a general essay structure for all of them, along with content. In the exam, however, none of these topics were asked in essay (One of the topics was asked in FnM paper, and I was completely prepared for it). The exercise of preparing a general structure of essay helped me to prepare an essay on completely new topic.
The Most Important Thing…
There were a lot of candidates in my exam room who weren’t able to complete the answers because of slow typing speed. I fortunately had learnt touch typing and I feel that’s a very important skill to have in this examination. Touch typing simply means typing without seeing, or typing with only touching. The important thing to note is, learning touch typing is very simple. It hardly takes 2–3 hours to learn it. With little practice, you can type at the speed of 40–50 words per minute (wpm). And trust me, this skill is going to be very useful in this examination. In the exam, you’re expected to write about 2000 words in 90 minutes. That requires a typing speed of only about 23 wpm. If you can type fast, you’ll get more time to think about your answers and that’ll help a lot.
Afterthoughts
I was under the impression that my answer writing skills are quite decent, and I need no practice for the same. However, on checking my marks after the results were declared, I realized that my beliefs were too far off from the truth. In fact, I secured very poor marks in answer writing.
I urge candidates not to make this mistake. To this day, I am not sure how to improve answer writing, but one place to start is building up the content. Since I did not have time, I just went through the notes provided by the coaching. It did save me a lot of time and I was able to digest a lot of material in very short span, but it did little to help me build content. If possible, do read from the original books that are commonly referred to for the exam. With better content, you’ll definitely be better off than I was.
At the end of this blog, you can find links of other toppers’ blogs, some of whom cleared the exam without any coaching. Please scroll to the end, if you are just interested in those.
Mains Test Series
As with prelims, I felt that the objective test series provided by Olive Board was much better than the one provided by the coaching. For the subjective part, I didn’t practice with any test series. The coaching I joined provided a couple of documents that contained sample answers and questions, and I found them really useful for revision as well as answer writing structure.
Interview
The results of Mains examination were declared on July 11, and my interview was scheduled on Oct 7. As a result, I had more time to prepare for interview than I had for prelims and mains combined. Also, for interview, I was mostly on my own, with little help from any coaching institute. As such, this is where I had to learn most of the things and this is probably the longest section. While I could barely cross the cut off in mains examination, I received 65/75 in Interview. It was interview that made the difference for me.
After going through a lot of videos and blogs, here’s what I figured should be prepared for the interview:
- RBI Website: Complete Home Page
- Speeches from RBI website for past 3 months
- Daily read a financial daily
- Annual Report of RBI (latest)
- Financial Stability Report of RBI (latest)
- Functions and Workings Document of RBI (here)
- Current Affairs of past three months
- Summary of Economic Survey
Note that the aforementioned things are only the common things. Your profile and biodata must be prepared by you separately.
Also note that interview transcripts are a very good guide of what to read and what not to. If you’ve some transcripts of the current year, definitely go through them.
RBI Website: Complete Home Page and Speeches
On the RBI website, there is a lot of data in left pane: policy rates, reserve rates, etc. Then there’s six logos (Lodge a complaint, MANI, Retail Direct etc). All of these need to be covered.
On the right pane, there are function wise sites. Go through them all. In the central pane, definitely be aware of things in What’s New section.
Similarly go to the speeches page (here) and thoroughly go through speeches of past 3 months from you interview.
Financial Daily
For interview, you need to have an opinion on important economic events happening all around. I learnt the importance of this through mock interviews. Just choose any financial daily and read it to get an understanding of what’s happening all around. Necessarily go through editorial articles as well. I referred to Live Mint, but you can use any financial daily of your choice
Reports of RBI
Get an overview of Annual Report and Financial Stability Report of RBI. Annual report contains a lot of information, you’ll have to figure out which one to read and which one to leave.
Current Affairs of past 3 months
I read the current affairs magazine provided by the coaching for this.
RBI’s Functions and Workings
This is a relatively old document and you should only go through it if you’ve enough time left, after covering all other things. I am aware of several interview questions that were asked directly out of it. For example, should we allow banks to fail?
Profile and Biodata
You need to thoroughly understand your profile and biodata form and expected questions from them. Prepare a document that contains questions and answers for the same heading. Also, prepare HR questions. Here’s a good guide for the same.
Mock Interviews
I subscribed to all mock interviews that I could find. I had appeared for four mock interviews: Anuj Jindal (AJ), Olive Board, ixambee and EduTap. And in each mock, I got the correct direction to go forward with. All of them were helpful.
I hope this was helpful. If you have any queries, please reach out to me here, and I will answer them (I may take some time, but I will definitely answer).
Final Interview
This blog contains the complete transcript of my final interview.
Links to Toppers’ Blogs
This video contains strategy of Mr. Vikas Poonia (AIR 1). He prepared by himself without any coaching.
This is the Quora page of my good friend Kirtivardhan (AIR 13). You can find link to his blog and preparation strategy here. He also prepared by himself without any coaching.
This blog contains strategies of several toppers of RBI Grade B 2022.
This blog contains strategies of some toppers of RBI Grade B 2021.
