Practice questions
This is a huge part of your SQE prep that you absolutely cannot ignore. If you go on TikTok and listen to people who have failed reflect on what went wrong, a lot of them will tell you that it wasn't that they didn't spend enough time revising the FLK per se, but that they simply didn't get through enough practice questions.
Which is more important — FLK or practice questions?
People on one extreme of the spectrum will tell you that there is way too much FLK and there is no point reading the books cover to cover - so just skip straight to learning from the practice questions. People on the other extreme of the spectrum will tell you that as long as you know the FLK inside out, you will be fine and that there is no point attempting too many questions as the SRA will test outside of that anyway. I think the only thing that helped me pass is having a good balance of both.
People in the former camp will tell you to just focus on bashing out the questions and learning from there. One of the girls in the year above at my sponsor firm apparently only skimmed through the manuals without making any notes and mainly studied from the question bank but still managed to pass. She did qualify her statement by saying that she knew for a fact she had 'photographic memory' so didn't feel the need to make any substantive notes and given her personal circumstances, learning through the practice questions was the most time-efficient way. People in the latter camp will tell you that you need to know everything else outside what the question banks test you on as well.
IMO there is some truth to both camps — knowing the FLK inside out alone will not help you pass. You need to have had a lot of practice APPLYING it in the style of SBAQs. It's one thing to understand the concept broadly, but it's a whole different story to know how to digest a complex fact pattern in an average of 1 min 42 secs and pick the single best answer out of 5 possible options. But at the same time, you need to remember that there is so much more in the spec that the SRA can test you on that ULaw had never imagined they can test, let alone write 5 variations of questions for and upload to their question bank in time for you to practice. This was exactly why I felt so defeated coming out of the exam. I felt like I knew so much yet so little at the same time. It just felt like I was repeatedly punched in the face by the SRA when I would recognise a specific piece of information but to answer the question, I needed another specific piece of information which can be found just a few sentences down or on the next page of the ULaw manual but for the life of me I could not recall it during the exam because I have never been tested on it in ULaw's question bank. But at the same time I was glad that I made a meaningful dent in the ULaw's question bank because doing so meant that I have covered just enough ground for the at least the key topics that ULaw predicts are examinable. The key is to really understand that FLK thoroughly so that you can apply the knowledge even when you are thrown a completely different set of facts and style of question - and doing practice questions will help you exercise that application muscle. On top of exercising that muscle, you just need to make sure that you are also keeping on top of understanding and memorising the fine print of the FLK.
How many practice questions is enough practice questions? How high do I need to score on practice questions?
I will be outlining my average scores that I was getting below, not to put pressure on anyone or to suggest that this is the bottomline of what you need to be doing to pass. You can very well do much more or do much less and still pass just fine. I just wanted to be honest and transparent about the progress I was making because I found it really hard to gauge whether I was doing enough because no one on TikTok, Reddit or in real life was sharing it openly. This is perfectly understandable, as the last thing you want to do is to share this openly and unintentionally push anyone's buttons, put pressure on someone else or make them feel insecure. But I just remembered feeling very frustrated because I felt like there was no way to gauge whether I was doing enough because nobody else was sharing how much they were doing and what scores they were getting. I think I felt this way because I am naturally just quite an anxious person and I think due to my upbringing I find it really hard to trust in making progress at my own pace without comparing myself to others. If you are perfectly comfortable in your own abilities without comparing yourself to others, that's absolutely perfect. But if you are more like me and you benefit from getting
some sense of where you fall compared to others and that you find more comfort in your situation that way, I hope that this serves as a useful gauge.
When people say there is no right or wrong answer to this, I do actually agree that there is no right or wrong answer to this. It's simply because there are so many variables at play which will determine what your journey will look like - a few (non-exhaustive) examples:
- Your learning style - some people learn better by passively reading because they've got great memory, some people learn better by active recall or application through practice questions etc
- Your mental health - some people handle anxiety better than others and are more calm throughout (even if you are a ball of nerves like me throughout the prep course, you will be fine provided you do manage to calm yourself down sufficiently when you sit the actual exam)
- Your physical health - some people may need to spread their hours out more thinly instead of doing long cramming sessions (they may do 3,000 questions across 4 months instead of crammed into 1 month and still retain the exact same amount of information and achieve the same results)
I recall telling a friend about how insecure I felt knowing I don't get near perfect scores like the rest of my classmates and everybody else I see at ULaw and he literally just said to me bluntly: "well maybe they're just smarter than you". And it's true LOL. The truth is, A LOT of people out there are easily 10x smarter than me — these are people who have been hand-picked by top City firms - of course they are. But the point is, so what? You don't need to be the smartest person in the room to pass; you just need to be smart
enough to pass. So even if you are like me and feel anxious either not knowing how others are doing and not being able to compare yourself to them, or knowing how they're doing but nevertheless feel shit comparing yourself to them, ultimately, you just need to critically and objectively assess your own abilities as you go along and focus on doing what is right for you, depending on your own strengths and weaknesses. If you are weak in black letter law, revise FLK harder. But if you know you are weak at application, you need to do more practice questions.
Which provider has the best practice questions?
I have only used ULaw, ReviseSQE full practice sit and the QLTS free sample test — so I can only speak from these 3 sets of questions.
The unfortunate truth is that no one provider on the market gets their questions to 100% similarity to the actual questions. I remember feeling very unsettled going into the exam not knowing what the questions look like. And with the confidentiality agreement in place there is nothing you can do about it. So apologies if at any point I sound too vague to be helpful.
You cannot count on a particular provider having questions bang on with the actual questions and rely on that alone to pass — because no one provider actually gets its just right IMO. Some people who have sat the exam may think otherwise and if you do, feel free to disagree with me and share your thoughts below. Some people do still swear by the QLTS questions. I do not have access to the full suite of QLTS questions, so I cannot tell if this is true for the full bank. But I personally feel the QLTS free sample questions still was not very similar to the real thing.
I can't really put my finger on exactly why I felt the actual questions felt so hard, but from how people I know described it as well as my own experience, I think what made the actual exam questions so hard was a mixture of a few different factors:
- Length — a lot of questions were very long and takes a long time to even finish reading through the question even once, let alone think about it and pick the right answer
- Critical analysis — some questions seriously test your ability to identify relevant information and discount irrelevant information, then apply the correct law to the relevant facts to arrive at the correct option. So if you don't know the underlying FLK, there is no way you would be able to answer these questions.
- Single best answer — a lot of the questions took the single best answer element to the next level. I often found myself stuck between two or three answers that I thought were possible, but unable to pick one definitive option either because I didn't know the law in enough detail or because I couldn't (given the time constraints) properly apply the correct law to the facts. The only consolation you can get from this is that if you can at least eliminate two or three obviously wrong answers, you at least have a higher than 20% chance of guessing the correct answer lol. So the fact that it is a single best answer questions I suppose is a blessing and a curse at the same time.
- Throwaway questions — I recall encountering questions that were complete 'throwaways' to me (i.e. the questions you see and you immediately think — "I give up"). These are the questions which you have completely zero clue how to answer and you can either recall zero law or any law that is remotely applicable to the fact pattern you are given. These will be the questions that will be a genuine dice roll and make you feel the most shit afterwards (because you essentially will actually only have a 20% of getting it right). The goal during your revision is to know FLK in enough breadth and also depth to minimise the number of genuine dice rolls that you need to do. I can only recall very little throwaway questions that were due to me not knowing a piece of information because it was never taught by ULaw by tutors or in the manual. The vast majority of it was taught at some point — but the only reason I couldn't answer these questions was either because I cannot recall the information (because I haven't quite memorised it well enough) or because I didn't have enough time to properly think about how to apply the law that I do know to the question and carefully select an answer due to the time constraints.
Of course, not all questions in the actual exam were as difficult as described above. There were some straightforward and shorter questions as well I'm sure, but I think I just can't remember them because they didn't traumatise me as much. Most people who have sat SQE1 (myself included), when asked about how they feel after the exam but before results will tell you the exact same thing — "I
honestly cannot tell you how it went". I think this is largely due to the sheer number of questions you get through in such a short span of time. Because there are 360 questions, so much of it just goes right past your head so quickly you really don't have the capacity during the exam to really keep track of e.g. what proportion of questions I felt were easy/manageable, questions I felt meh about or what proportion were throwaway questions. This is why it's so hard to gauge how well you've actually done after you come out of the test centre; you can hardly remember the content of the questions you answered because so many of them were so long and complex, let alone estimate the number of questions you actually felt confident about.
ULaw practice questions:
When I was prepping for SQE1, the ULaw question bank had close to 4,000 questions, spread across easy, medium and difficult. I remember talking to BPP folks about this and some BPP folks feeling anxious that ULaw folks have got so much more practice questions to work with. I'd say don't let this fool you or affect you too much - there is a good number of questions that are high quality but there are also loads that are just questions that are almost 100% similar to each other. So just because you've attempted every question in the bank doesn't mean you're actually covering a lot of ground in terms of FLK. Besides, BPP has a great pass rate despite not having a practice question app or 4,000 questions of their own.
If you are with ULaw, just treat the questions you see in the question bank as the floor, not the ceiling. There are some questions that are maybe of a similar difficulty to the real thing (especially the weekly practice tests and the questions they use for internal mocks, as opposed to the general bank - so I would recommend going over the difficult questions at least once or twice). But by and large it did
feel like most of the questions in the real thing were much harder than the ULaw questions — but bear in mind this might just be because anyone who has come out of these exams will have only really remembered the horrendous parts but not the easier questions.
Some people on this forum have asked what is the right number of practice questions that you should be doing. When I was prepping I wondered the same. Having gone through it now I can tell you there is no right answer to this. You need to take control of your own revision and figure out how much you need to do to either brush up on FLK or to exercise your application muscle, depending on which department you feel weak in for any given subject.
What I did:
- For the most part I kept up with the 15 weekly practice tests each week. Might have done a couple more on top of that but not much. Apart from that I did not do any more questions during term time. And I just spent most of my time making flashcards and learning from the manuals.
- December was when I really cracked down on practice questions and my stats right now show me that in December 2024 I did approx 2,800 ULaw questions. And in January 2025 I did approx 2,000 questions. The reason I could get through so much was because I practically dropped my dry FLK revision and only focused on application. I would attempt these questions and for the ones I got wrong, I would tag my Anki cards and dedicate a few hours a day to review only my tagged cards, then back into more practice questions — then just rinse and repeat. I had friends who structured their revision way differently to mine. A lot of them actually dedicated more days to FLK revision, then only attempt questions later on. I think that approach is fine, as long as you don't end up neglecting practice questions and have no time to exercise your application muscle until the very last minute — you should be able to avoid this is you have a very detailed study plan set up to cover all the ground you need for FLK but also set for yourself a benchmark for minimum questions that you want to get through in the time you have left. In retrospect, I don't think my practice question cramming in December and January was particularly effective either and (as detailed below) if I could do it all over again, I probably would have spread out my practice questions a bit more and attempted more questions during term time and dedicating maybe a bit more time towards the end for dry FLK revision without practice questions. This is because even when I was cramming using practice questions towards the end I was literally still losing sleep worrying about whether I've covered enough ground in dry FLK revision and picturing all the horrible questions the SRA will test me on that's outside of what the ULaw question bank has tested me on.
- Both my classmates and I found that the questions in the weekly practice tests and the mocks were harder than the ones in the general question bank. So a few weeks before the exam I re-attempted all these questions once and drilled down on all the stuff I was still getting wrong a second time. These questions were more difficult, so served as a good baseline to prep myself for even more difficult questions in the real exam. Basically just make sure you don't stay complacent with getting through only the easy questions.
What I would have done differently:
- Bite the bullet and just attempt at least 15 random questions a day, even if I don't know how to answer them. I would have exercised my application muscle earlier in the course rather than only work on it towards the end.
- Make it a point to attempt the questions closed book, and practice reading + answering new questions within an average of 1 min 42 seconds. I wasted too much time faffing about and not really focusing on practising my time management.
- As mentioned above, just learning from the question bank alone won't help you pass. You need to understand the content you are being tested on (enough to apply it to a new style of questions and much more complex fact patterns altogether) and make time to revise outside of the question bank from your flashcards and long form notes as well.
- Overall I scored in the 71 - 74% region. Of course thrown in the mix is the occasional 90% or 33% lol but it kind of averaged out to 70%+ throughout the entire course. I remember freaking out over not consistently getting 90% as my other classmates and I was convinced that if I can only score 70% with ULaw it means I will only score 50% in the real exam and it meant that I would fail. I remember talking to one of my classmates about this and she gave me a reality check — some people will have consistently scored in the 90% region due to many different factors — maybe they always do their questions open book, maybe they attempt a lot of questions right after they studied a specific topic, maybe they have done so many questions from the start that they simply got used to the ULaw questions and have practically memorised the questions and the answers rather than actually actively recalling their FLK and exercising their application muscle. Point is, if you don't know what other people's circumstances are, there is no point comparing yourself to them.
- My raw scores in the real exam turned out to be similar to what I was averaging on ULaw practice questions. So I've learnt that though you will never feel 100% confident going in because neither ULaw nor any other provider on the market get the style and difficulty of questions exactly right, you kind of just have to trust the process and know that if you are keeping up with your reading, consistent with flashcard review, find time to revise the fine print stuff that keep slipping from your memory and practising application, you are actually unconsciously building up understanding and reinforcing the FLK that you need to pass.
Other providers:
I attempted the full set of ReviseSQE questions I think maybe one week before the exam and I scored roughly high 60s to mid-70%. I think ReviseSQE was the only full practice sit I had ever done and in retrospect I feel I should have done maybe at least one more round of full practice sit, just to get myself used to the gruelling 5 hours that you will go through on the actual day itself and more crucially, practise my time management in the context of a full sit (rather than e.g. just doing short 30-question quizzes averaging 1 min 42 secs each Q). In reality during a full sit you will have some questions which take you 30 seconds to answer vs some which will take you maybe 2 mins or more to answer - but you just need to learn how to manage your time throughout and make sure you have enough time overall. If you go on the Pearson Vue functionality test you will see that the timer simply counts down from 153 minutes. The way that I kept time for each session during the actual exam was making sure I wasn't running overtime on average after each 30-question block e.g. by Q30 you want to make sure you have at least 102 minutes left. By Q60 you want to make sure you have at least 51 minutes left. I wish I practised this a bit more, as I did run very very short on time during one of my sessions during the actual exam. If you know time management is a pain point for you (it was certainly for me), I recommend doing at least one or two full practice sits to practise it.
I attempted the QLTS free sample questions around the same time and I think I scored around 74%. I didn't find them significantly harder than or similar to the normal ULaw questions or the actual exam questions. The style of questions were different to other providers, but I didn't feel that the FLK tested was any more difficult. But it is good to practise application of FLK on a different style of questions, to train yourself to apply the law even with an unfamiliar style of questions or new fact patterns.
I attempted the SRA sample questions around the same time and I remembered I scored around 85%-90%. Not much to say about this except I guess the style / language of questions in the sample is somewhat similar to the real thing, but level of difficulty portrayed by the sample questions is not commensurate with the level of difficulty I personally recall encountering during the actual exam. I caveat this statement by highlighting that I am not purporting to state this as a matter of fact and that this is only my personal opinion based on my personal experience. I am not saying that there is no value at all in the SRA sample questions; I do appreciate that the SRA has given some indication of the style of questions to expect. And I also appreciate that maybe it is fair to provide as sample questions simply a snapshot of the style of questions to expect without suggesting that the level of difficulty would also be similar to that of the sample questions. I do recommend still attempting them though, just to see the style of questions, but just be prepared for questions that are significantly more difficult during the actual exams.
