Stay calm: I vividly remember seeing fellow candidates in the queue at the exam centre busy cramming with their paper/electronic notes and telling me that they’d only slept for 2-3 hours the night before. Unsurprisingly, these were the candidates who struggled to complete the exam (you need to remain focused for 3 hours!) and score as well. Calmness is truly key! Avoid last-minute studying if you can. Pilot questions are also included alongside the test for the purpose of item development; however, you will not be scored on these. Professional Dilemmas Paper

The MSRA is designed to assess essential competencies expected at foundation level. The Professional Dilemmas paper assesses your professional behaviours and judgements in relation to clinical scenarios; relating directly to the General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) generic professional capabilities framework, it thereby assesses the capabilities expected of all doctors. The Clinical Problem Solving paper assesses your ability to make appropriate clinical decisions drawing on your clinical knowledge and problem solving skills; based on the Foundation Programme, it assesses competencies expected at this stage of your experience. Therefore, the MSRA is an accessible and fair examination for entry to ST. Many specialties – namely community sexual and reproductive health, general practice, neurosurgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, ophthalmology, psychiatry (core and child and adolescent), and radiology – use the MSRA in selection processes for specialty training. 1 Negative marking is not utilised. Consequently, candidates are encouraged to answer all questions. 1 I found the scoring scale for MSRA slightly confusing as there is no maximum score achievable. Instead, they used a system called ‘normalisation’ which takes into account the score of everyone who takes the exam and normalises them around a mean score of 250 with a standard deviation of 40. The scores are then placed into bands 1-4. Band 1 are the lowest scores and are unsuccessful in progressing further, and 4 includes the highest scorers. Don’t underestimate the difficulty of the MSRA, start studying early, and do as many questions as you can afford to. It will pay off.Assesses your ability to apply clinical knowledge to help make clinical decisions – it is not a test of pure knowledge. The Clinical Problem Solving Paper is designed to assess your ability to apply your clinical knowledge and make clinical decisions within the context of everyday practice.

The MSRA is separated into two sections, and you can see an example of a question from each section in our question bank below. Professional Dilemmas Paper Focus: Work out what it is you need to do and do only that! For me this was using a number of different question banks, generating my own notes from the ones with more detailed answers and then practising, practising, practising!Pass med: again very wide breadth, questions maybe a bit more similar to the actual exam compared to pastest, but still very different. I didn’t do that many in the question bank as I ran out of time, I know a lot do people who only did passmed and did very well. Although not strictly related to revision, it’s always worth remembering that neither paper in the MSRA exam is negatively marked, so it’s worth attempting to answer all questions as it may just get you an extra few marks on the exam. Hopefully this has provided you with basic information about the MSRA to help you to begin your preparation for the exam. That being said, the MSRA is competitive, and as discussed previously, outperforming your peers can have significant advantages for your ST recruitment; therefore, the importance of preparing well for the MSRA should not be underestimated. Effective preparation will develop your understanding of the types of questions you’ll be asked and the exam expectations, allowing you to build experience and confidence when answering the questions. The ‘how to revise’ section below will provide guidance and tips on preparing successfully for the MSRA. What is a good score on the MSRA? The Multi Specialty Recruitment Assessment (MSRA / SRA) is used by various specialties as part of the recruitment process for training posts. It has been used longest for GP training. In this article, Dr Amelia Thompson explains how she scored 610 and got a direct offer while juggling studying with caring for 2 young children and working in Malawi!

Otherremarks:Tobehonest,thisexamwasprobablyharderthanPart2asitincludedsomanyrandombasicsciencetypequestionswhichisn'tparticularlyhelpfultoclinicalpractice-it'sahurdlethatalotofushavetogothroughthough.Extended matching questions – EMQ (chose the single most appropriate answer from a choice – answers relate to several questions)