How to pass the GPhC registration assessment.

Know the paper before you revise for it.

Everything in the registration assessment is written from the framework the GPhC publishes for that year’s sittings: the topics, the skills, and how heavily each is weighted. Nothing outside it is examined. That makes it the syllabus, and the first thing to read — before a textbook, and long before a question bank.

• Both papers are sat on the same day. Both parts must be passed at the same sitting; a strong Part 2 cannot make up for a weak Part 1, or the reverse.
• There is no fixed pass mark. Each paper’s mark is set by a standard-setting process after the sitting, so a harder paper carries a lower mark. You are measured against a standard, not against the rest of the room, and there is nothing to gain from waiting for a kinder sitting.
• Every question is worth one mark and there is no negative marking. A blank is the only answer guaranteed to score nothing.
• References are supplied on screen. Where a question needs a BNF or BNFC extract, a Summary of Product Characteristics, a medication chart or a photograph, it comes with the question. You are being tested on using the reference correctly under time, not on having memorised it.
• A calculator is allowed in both papers — your own, if it is a model the GPhC permits, or the on-screen one. Revise with the calculator you will sit with, so that on the day your hands already know it.
• The paper runs on the GPhC’s online platform, and the GPhC publishes example questions for both parts on it. They are not a mock and they do not time out, but they are the only way to meet the interface — the flagging, the calculator, the resource panel — before it counts.

The regulator also says something worth taking at face value: it endorses no external revision material, and it regards the foundation training year itself as the best preparation there is. Every prescription you screen and every query you take to the BNF is an exam question with a real patient attached. Nothing on this page, or on any other, replaces that. It organises it.

Start from the framework, not from a question bank.

The commonest way to waste the months of preparation is to open a question bank on day one and start scoring yourself. A score tells you how you did on those questions. It does not tell you what you have never been taught, because you will steer round those topics without noticing. Start with the map instead.

1. 01Audit yourself against the framework. Take its list of topics and skills and, against each line, mark honestly: confident, shaky, or never seen it. Judge by what you have actually done in training, not by what you would like to think you know.
2. 02Turn every gap into an action with a date on it. Specific (which topic, which reference), measurable (what you will be able to do afterwards), achievable in the time you have, realistic alongside a working week, and time-bound. “Revise cardiology” is a wish. “By Friday, work every heart-failure and atrial-fibrillation question in the bank with the BNF chapter open, then again with it closed” is an action.
3. 03Order the actions by weight, not by preference. The framework tells you which areas carry the most marks. They get the first slots and the longest ones. The topics you enjoy will look after themselves.
4. 04Review the plan weekly. What was shaky in week one should be confident by week six. If it is not, the method needs changing, not repeating.

Question banks come in once you know what you are testing. Used first, they flatter you on what you already know. Used second, they are the check that the plan is working — and a wrong answer with a named source attached is the fastest route back to the paragraph you needed.

Do not put the training year on hold to revise. Ask your designated supervisor to put you in front of the things you marked “never seen”: the ward round, the clinic, the controlled-drugs check, the patient with the awkward question. That is revision the paper cannot tell apart from experience, because it is experience.

Revise in a way that survives exam pressure.

Most trainees revise the way that got them through university: read, highlight, read again, feel the page become familiar. Familiarity is not recall, and recall under a clock is what is being tested. Six changes make the difference, and none of them is complicated.

Learn in layers.

First, what a drug is and does. Then why: the mechanism, and the reason it is chosen over its neighbours. Then how it is applied: the dose for this patient, the monitoring, the interaction with whatever else they take. Last, the judgement: whether it is the right choice at all, and what you would do instead. The paper lives in the last two layers. A table of indications learned by heart will not get you there; a patient you have reasoned through will.

Close the book and retrieve.

Retrieval is the revision, not the test of it. At the end of a topic, shut the notes and write down everything you can: the classes, the doses, the monitoring, the cautions, the counselling points. Then open the BNF and mark what you missed. What you could retrieve is learned. What you had to look up goes back on the list. Reading a page a second time feels productive and does almost nothing.

Space it, and let the gaps grow.

Anything learned today is half gone within days unless you meet it again. Revisit today’s topic tomorrow and at the end of the week. The week after, revisit everything from the previous week alongside the new material. Then let the interval widen: a fortnight, a month. Each successful retrieval earns a longer gap. The aim is not to have covered a topic once. It is to still be able to reach it on the day.

Connect, don’t file.

Topics stored in separate folders are forgotten separately. Draw the links: the condition, the drugs, the mechanism, the monitoring, the interactions, the counselling. Sketching the renin–angiotensin pathway once from memory, and hanging the ACE inhibitors, the ARBs, the potassium and the renal monitoring off it, teaches more than four pages of notes — and the sketch is a retrieval test and a revision aid in one.

Explain it to someone.

Teaching a topic to another trainee, or to an imagined patient, shows within thirty seconds where the understanding runs out. Study groups are good for exactly this and for little else: not for listening, but for taking turns to be the one who has to explain.

Use cases, not lists.

A case pulls everything together the way the paper does: this patient, these drugs, this renal function, this question. Case-based practice is the closest thing to the exam you can do at a desk, and it is also how a pharmacist actually thinks. Do not try to memorise the entire BNF. You cannot, and the paper does not ask you to. It asks you to reason from what you know to a safe decision.

Part 1: calculations are a method, not a memory.

40 questions in 120 minutes is 3 minutes each: enough to work a calculation twice — once forward to reach an answer, once back to check it — and no more. That is the whole strategy, and it only works if the method is automatic.

• Practise the method, not the answer. The commonest failure is recognising a question type from a past paper and recalling its answer rather than its working, which collapses the moment the numbers change. Practise with questions whose values change every time, write the answer down before you check, and treat a right answer reached by the wrong route as a wrong answer. The calculations bench here does exactly that, free and without limit.
• Write the unit on every line. Milligrams, grams, millilitres, millimoles, micrograms, drops per minute: carry the unit through every step. It costs seconds, and it exposes a wrong conversion before it becomes a wrong answer. Most Part 1 errors are unit errors wearing an arithmetic disguise.
• Round when the question says, not when it is convenient. Per dose or per day; to a decimal place; to the nearest penny; to the nearest 0.05 mL; to the nearest whole tablet. The question tells you, and rounding at the wrong stage produces a confident, wrong number. Read the instruction line twice.
• Know the types. The paper is built from a finite set of calculation types: doses by weight and body surface area, infusion and drip rates, dilutions and displacement values, concentrations and ratio strengths, renal function, quantities to supply. Work one of each until the setup is a reflex, then mix them. There is a worked example of every one of the 26 types here. Be especially careful with anything that carries a constant depending on the patient — sex, age, weight — where the arithmetic is easy and the setup is what catches people.
• Type the answer as soon as you have it, then move on. Working on paper and entering everything at the end is how candidates run out of time with correct answers on their scrap sheet.
• Check by a different route. With time left, re-derive flagged answers a second way: estimate the order of magnitude, work it per kilogram instead of per dose, convert back to the starting units. A wrong answer rarely survives two independent methods.
• Sanity-check against the patient. A tablet dose in grams of something usually given in micrograms, or an infusion running at two drops a minute, is telling you something. The paper’s numbers are clinically plausible. If yours is not, look for the unit slip before you look anywhere else.

Part 2: clinical judgement, a minute at a time.

120 questions in 150 minutes: about a minute for each single-best-answer question and 2 for each extended-matching question. There is no time to reason from first principles on every one. There is time to read, eliminate and decide.

• Find the question inside the stem. Most stems carry more information than the question needs, and several options are true statements that do not answer it. Locate the actual ask — most appropriate, first-line, most urgent, contraindicated, next step — before you read a single option.
• Eliminate first. In a single-best-answer question, two of the five options are usually wrong on sight; cross them out and choose among the rest. In an extended-matching set the eight options are shared across the scenarios, so strike the ones that fit none of them, then match the remainder.
• Look twice at options that look alike. Distractors are written to differ by one detail: a strength, a unit, a formulation, a frequency, a single word. When two options look the same, the difference between them is the question.
• Use the on-screen resources with discipline. BNF extracts, Summaries of Product Characteristics and charts appear when a question needs them. A search is quick, but what you find has to fit this patient, this indication and this question; the right dose by the wrong route is a wrong answer. Decide what you are looking for before you search.
• Revise from the BNF, with the source attached. Part 2 is written from current UK practice as the BNF states it. Practise on questions whose answer is tied to a named BNF passage, so that what you learn is what will be marked, and a wrong answer sends you straight to the paragraph you need. The clinical bank here names its source on every answer.
• Do not leave law, ethics and professional judgement to the last fortnight. They carry marks, they are rarely intuitive, and they are the questions where “what would a reasonable pharmacist do” has a specific, learnable answer.
• If you qualified outside the UK, the paper is the same but the gap usually is not. UK laboratory units, BNF conventions, NHS prescribing frameworks and UK medicines law are where the marks go missing. Weight your plan toward them.

Sit at least two full mocks under the clock.

Knowing the material and performing it in a timed paper are different skills. Sit at least two full mock assessments before the real one, under the real conditions: both papers, the same time limits, the calculator you will use, no notes, no pauses. The first shows you what breaks under time. The second shows you whether you fixed it.

• Sit both papers on one day at least once, in the right order. Tiredness in Part 2 after two hours of Part 1 is part of the exam, and it is better met in a mock.
• Mark by error type, not by score. Every wrong answer is one of four things: you did not know it; you knew it but misread the question; you knew it but slipped in the arithmetic; you knew it but ran out of time. Each has a different fix, and a percentage hides which one you have.
• Meet the platform before your first mock. Work the GPhC’s example questions on the real system first, so the interface is not a variable when you are trying to measure yourself.
• Do not read a mock score as a pass mark. There is no fixed pass mark, and a mock written by anyone other than the Board of Assessors is a different paper. Mocks find weaknesses. They do not predict results.

The mock exam here is built to the paper’s own shape — 40 calculations typed in, then 90 single best answers and 30 extended matching — under its own clock.

The weeks before: the admin you cannot leave late.

Some of the ways people fail to sit have nothing to do with pharmacy.

• Apply inside the window. Applications open and close on published dates a few months before each sitting, through your myGPhC account, with a non-refundable fee. Check that the confirmation arrives and that the payment has left your account; if either is missing, contact the GPhC before the deadline, not after it. Trainees on the Northern Ireland programme apply through the Pharmaceutical Society NI.
• Sort the identification now. On the day you are identified by a valid passport or a photocard driving licence, and nothing else. It must be in date on the day, and the name on it must match the name the GPhC holds for you and the name on your application. An expired document, or a name that changed at marriage, is fixable weeks out and not on the morning.
• Reasonable adjustments have their own, earlier deadline. If a health condition, disability or specific learning need could disadvantage you, request the adjustment as soon as the window opens. One already granted for all sittings carries forward; a new or different one needs a new request.
• Be fit to sit. If you sit while unwell or affected by something serious, you are treated as having declared yourself fit, and that limits what can be done afterwards. If something is genuinely wrong, the decision to withdraw is a hard one, and it belongs before the day rather than after it.
• Know where you are going. You are allocated to the nearest available centre to your registered address, with a short window to move if a closer one has space. Plan the journey and the arrival time before the week of the exam.
• Protect the last week. Stop learning new material several days out. Sleep, eat properly, move, and drop the intensity to light retrieval of the high-weight topics. A tired candidate misreads questions, and that is the one error no amount of revision can fix. If the pressure has become something more than pressure, the charity Pharmacist Support exists for exactly this and is free to use.

On the day.

1. 01Arrive early, with your identification, your own approved calculator if you are using one, and nothing you are not permitted to have.
2. 02Read every question to the end. The mark is often in a detail: the maximum, one eye rather than both, the nearest whole number, two decimal places.
3. 03Answer as you go. In Part 1, type each answer as soon as you have it. In Part 2, choose an answer before you flag; a flagged blank is a mark thrown away if you never get back to it.
4. 04Flag sparingly. Flag what genuinely needs a second look. Thirty flags is a list you cannot review; six is.
5. 05Do not get stuck. If a question is eating time, make your best attempt, flag it, and move on. It usually reads differently when you return.
6. 06Eliminate first in Part 2, and look twice at options that look alike.
7. 07Search the resources with a question in mind, and check that what you find applies to the patient in front of you.
8. 08Use every remaining minute to review: flagged questions first, then re-check calculations by a different method, then confirm that each answer answers the question actually asked.
9. 09Leave nothing blank. There is no negative marking. A reasoned guess can score; an empty box cannot.
10. 10Keep moving. The paper tests judgement, accuracy and time management together. Calm and methodical beats fast and rattled, every time.

A plan for however long you have left.

Preparation for the registration assessment scales to the time you have. Three shapes, all built on the same loop.

Twelve weeks or more.

Weeks one and two: audit yourself against the framework, write the plan, and work the GPhC’s example questions on the platform. Weeks three to nine: through the plan topic by topic with the weekly loop, and twenty minutes of calculations every day. Week ten: the first full mock, both papers, reworked by error type. Week eleven: the second full mock, and a final gap list. Week twelve: light retrieval, the admin, and rest.

Six weeks.

The same shape, halved. The audit takes three days, not two weeks. Calculations daily from day one. Two mocks, at the end of week four and the end of week five. Order everything by framework weight and accept that something low-weight will be left thin. That is a better outcome than everything being left thin.

Two weeks.

No new topics. Calculations every day, under time. One full mock in the first two days, marked by error type, and the remaining days spent on the errors it found and the highest-weight topics only. Sleep as if it were on the framework, because in effect it is.

You do not need a perfect score. You need a method that still works when you are tired, a plan that put the hours where the marks are, and enough practice under the clock that the day feels like the fifth mock rather than the first exam.