How to revise for Best of Five exams

Best of Five, or single best answer, questions are used in most postgraduate and licensing medical exams. Each question gives a clinical scenario and five options that are often all plausible. Your job is to pick the best one. That format rewards clinical reasoning far more than memorised facts, and it changes how you should revise.

1. Read the notes before the questions

Going straight to a question bank feels productive, but without a framework each question is an isolated fact. Spend a short session on the topic first: the key presentations, the first-line investigation, the first-line treatment and the common traps. Then do the questions on that topic. You will recognise patterns instead of guessing.

2. Read every explanation, including the ones you got right

A correct answer chosen for the wrong reason will fail you next time. The explanation is where the learning happens. Check why the right answer is best and why each of the other four is worse. Those wrong options are often the right answer to a different question.

3. Keep an error log

Write down every question you get wrong in one line: the topic, what you chose, what was correct, and the rule you missed. Review the log weekly. Within a few weeks you will see that most of your mistakes fall into a small number of themes, and those themes are where your marks are.

4. Learn the guidelines the exam is written from

Exam answers follow current guidance. For UK exams that means NICE and the specialty society guidelines. When a question asks for the next step or the first-line drug, the answer is usually the one the guideline names. Revising from up-to-date sources matters more than revising from many sources.

5. Practise with images

Many questions now include a radiograph, an endoscopy picture, a skin finding or a histology slide. Recognition comes from seeing many examples, so make sure your practice material includes clinical images and not only text.

6. Move to timed practice

Early on, work untimed and learn. In the final weeks, switch to timed blocks that match the exam, roughly one to one and a half minutes per question. Finish with at least two full mock papers so that stamina and timing are not a surprise on the day.

7. Spread it out

Short daily sessions beat long weekend sessions. Return to each specialty several times over the revision period rather than finishing it once and moving on. Repetition at intervals is what makes knowledge stick under exam pressure.

Where the books fit

The Clinical Medicine Review series is built around this method. Each book opens every chapter with concise revision notes, then gives Best of Five questions on that topic, and every answer comes with a discussion of the diagnosis, investigations and management. Clinical images and teaching diagrams are included throughout. Gastroenterology, Neurology and Respiratory Medicine are available now on Amazon as Kindle eBooks and paperbacks.

For timed online practice, the question banks at License Medical work alongside the books.