How to choose an FCPS Part 1 question bank

The question bank matters more than the book

Most FCPS Part 1 candidates spend weeks choosing a theory book and five minutes choosing a question bank. It should be the other way round. The book teaches you once. The question bank is where you find out what you do not know, fix it, and practise the exact skill the exam tests: reading a stem and picking one best answer in under a minute.

So the bank you choose decides a large share of your score. Here is how to judge one.

1. Read ten explanations before you look at anything else

This is the single most useful test. Open ten questions you get wrong and read the explanations.

• A good explanation tells you why the right answer is right, why each wrong option is wrong, and the one fact to remember. After reading it, you could answer a differently worded question on the same point.
• A poor explanation is a one-line key, "Ref: First Aid page 312", or a paragraph copied from a textbook that does not mention the options at all.

If the explanations are thin, you will end up reading a book alongside every session, and the bank stops saving you time.

2. Check the keys

A wrong key costs you twice: you lose the mark in practice, and you learn something false that costs you again in the real paper. Recall-based collections are the most common source of wrong keys, because recalls are reconstructed from memory and the "answer" is often a guess that gets copied for years.

Take five questions on a topic you know well and check the keys yourself. If even one is clearly wrong with no correction, be careful.

3. Coverage: recalls and syllabus both matter

There are two kinds of bank:

• Recall-only banks are built from what candidates remember of past papers. They are close to the exam's style, but they miss topics nobody happened to remember, and they repeat the errors in the recalls.
• Syllabus-built banks cover the CPSP syllabus systematically, but if they ignore recalls they may spend time on topics that are rarely asked.

The best option uses recalls to decide what to ask and standard textbooks to decide what is correct.

4. Does it match your group?

Paper 1 is shared by the Medicine & Allied and Surgery & Allied groups, but Paper 2 is not. A bank that mixes everything together wastes your time on the other group's Paper 2 topics. Check that you can practise Paper 1 and your own group's Paper 2 separately.

5. Are the questions really "single best answer"?

FCPS Part 1 uses single best answer questions. In a well-written question, every option is plausible to someone who has not learnt the point. In a poorly written bank, you can often guess by spotting the longest option, the only clinical-sounding one, or the one that repeats words from the stem. If you find yourself scoring well without knowing why, the bank is too easy and your score will not transfer to the exam.

6. Timed mocks that match the real paper

You need full papers under exam timing (100 questions in 2 hours per paper) in the last month. A bank without timed mocks leaves you guessing whether you can keep your pace and concentration for the whole paper.

7. Revision tools you will actually use

Look for:

• A review of wrong answers and a way to re-test them later (spaced repetition).
• Performance by subject and topic, so you can see where you are weak.
• Notes or topic summaries linked to each question, so a wrong answer leads to the full topic, not just one fact.

8. Practical checks

• Does it work well on your phone, on hospital Wi-Fi or mobile data?
• Does access last until your exam date?
• Can you try a few questions before paying?
• Is there a way to report a doubtful key, and does anyone answer?

A simple two-day test

1. Day 1: do 40 questions from the bank in one sitting, on mixed subjects.
2. Day 2: without looking, try to answer the 15 or so you got wrong, using only what you remember from the explanations.

If you remember most of them, the explanations are teaching you. If you remember almost nothing, they are not.

Where FCPS-1 Prep fits

We built FCPS-1 Prep around these checks. Every question explains every option. Recalls decide what we ask, and keys are checked against standard textbooks. Paper 1 is shared, while Medicine & Allied and Surgery & Allied have their own Paper 2 sets. Each question links to a full topic review, so one wrong answer leads to the whole topic. Run the two-day test on it the same way you would on any other bank.

Read next: FCPS Part 1 complete guide · Books for FCPS Part 1 · Study plan

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