The pass mark is 300 out of 500
For every SQE1 sitting, the pass standard is a scaled score of 300 out of 500, in FLK1 and in FLK2 separately. That number does not move. What moves is how many questions you have to answer correctly to reach it.
This is the source of most of the confusion online. “The pass mark is 60 per cent” is true of the scale and false of the paper: 300 is 60 per cent of 500, but your raw score is not your scaled score.
What scaling does, and why
Two sittings of the same exam are never quite equally hard. If January’s paper happens to be a little more demanding than July’s, candidates in January should not be punished for the accident of which questions were drawn. Scaling — technically, equating — converts raw marks onto a common scale so that the same scaled score means the same level of competence whenever you sat.
Two things follow. First, you cannot know your raw target in advance, because it depends on the paper you get. Second, the standard is absolute rather than competitive: you are not passing by beating other candidates, you are passing by reaching the standard. The pass rate for a sitting is a consequence, not a quota.
What raw score does that take?
The SRA publishes the raw pass mark for each sitting after the event. Across recent sittings it has sat broadly between 56 and 60 per cent of the questions, which for a 170-question FLK is somewhere around 95 to 102 correct answers.
It is tempting to read that as “I need 57 per cent” and to aim there. That is a bad target for two reasons. The figure for your sitting is not knowable while you revise, and practice scores flatter you: questions you have seen before, sat without a clock, at home, with no exam-day adrenaline, are not the same questions. Most candidates lose several points between their practice average and the paper.
Quintiles: your place in the room
Your results show your mark, whether you passed, the pass mark for that sitting, and a quintile: which fifth of the cohort you landed in, 1 being the highest-scoring fifth and 5 the lowest.
For a candidate who passed, the quintile is interesting. For a candidate who did not, it is the most important line on the page, because it tells you what kind of resit you are facing:
- Quintile 3 with a near miss usually means the knowledge is broadly there and the losses are concentrated — a couple of subjects, or technique under time. That is a targeted resit.
- Quintile 4 or 5 usually means coverage, not polish. Repeating the same revision harder rarely moves it; changing what the revision consists of does.
Either way, what to do next is in the resit guide, and the first step is the same in both cases: find out where the marks went. That is what a breakdown by subject and task type is for, and why practising against analytics beats practising against a total.
What to aim for in practice
A working rule that has served candidates well:
- Under 60 per cent on unseen questions: you are revising knowledge, not exam technique. Keep covering ground.
- 60 to 70 per cent: the border. Good enough to pass on a kind paper, not good enough to book with confidence. This is the band where a subject-by-subject breakdown earns its keep.
- Low 70s and above, under time, on questions you have not seen: a comfortable margin over the standard, whichever way the paper falls.
Note the conditions attached to that last line. A percentage from a set you have already worked through, untimed, tells you nothing useful. A revision plan that ends in full timed mocks is how you find out what your number really is — while there is still time to move it.