This final year medical student from Barts and the London School of Medicine shares his experience of preparing for the most dreaded of undergraduate exams. 

Revising for end of year exams and medical finals is a daunting process, especially trying to figure out how much you need to learn and to what level. Over the years this has become slightly more bearable through experience, but also through practise.

At Barts we’ve seen a rise in the popularity of Single Best Answer questions. These are (arguably) slightly trickier than the traditional MCQ/EMQ based questions, as there is a claim for each of the potential answers to be right, but you must be able to decipher which is the “most right” answer from the information at hand.

This puts a lot of emphasis on the way a question is written and the information provided, as the smallest detail can make all the difference between choosing the right or wrong answer.

The university do not provide a question bank of practice questions, as their question bank is already limited. As a result, finding a good study resource has been really important to me in trying to prepare well for the examinations, and also in putting the medicine I’ve learn into context.

The Pastest resources, ranging from the books to the online question banks (which were especially useful), have been a cornerstone of my learning since entering my clinical years. They provide an active method of learning along with good-quality questions which are similar in calibre to those I get in my written papers. 

The ability to create my own mock papers, flag questions to come back to later, and arrange my questions according to difficulty has allowed me to work on subjects that I am weaker in and turn them into strengths.

The mobile app has been a great addition to the subscription as it allows me to study on the go when I’m commuting to and from university or firms, with the added bonus that you only need the internet once to download questions and not when actually answering the questions, which is very handy.

All in all the Pastest Finals resource has helped me improve my grades and clinical knowledge in a more efficient and effective manner than learning from books or other resources. If there was only one thing I could do to help me prepare for my exams it would be to do as many practice questions as possible.