Why questions are the revision
SQE1 is closed book, recall-based and roughly 108 seconds a question. Nothing you can only reconstruct from first principles will be available to you on the day. Retrieval practice — being asked, failing, being told why, being asked again later — is the one revision method that reliably builds that kind of recall, and answering questions is retrieval practice with a syllabus attached.
That is why the plan we recommend front-loads coverage and then spends the majority of the remaining time on questions. Reading feels productive because it is comfortable. Being wrong is uncomfortable, and it is the part that moves scores.
How many questions are enough
A useful working figure is 2,000 to 3,000 questions with a real review of each, which for most candidates means every topic met several times, in different guises. But the count is the least interesting number in your preparation. Two candidates who each answer 3,000 questions can arrive at wildly different places, depending on:
- Whether the wrong ones came back. A mistake reviewed once is usually a mistake repeated.
- Whether the questions were new. Re-answering a set you have seen measures memory of that set, not knowledge of the subject.
- Whether they were spread across the specification. Two thousand questions on your four favourite subjects is avoidance with good ergonomics.
A better target than a count: no topic on the specification that you have not answered questions on, and no mistake still on your list unexplained.
What separates a good question bank
Five things, in rough order of how much they matter:
- Explanations for every option. Knowing why the key is right teaches you one thing; knowing why the other four fail teaches you four, and those four are what the exam builds its distractors from.
- Authority behind the answer. A statute, a case or a rule you can check. Explanations that assert without citing are impossible to trust and impossible to learn from.
- The current format. Questions written for 90-question sessions across the whole specification rehearse a paper that no longer exists from January 2027 — see what changed.
- A record that acts on itself. Mistakes that return on a schedule, bookmarks you can find again, and a breakdown by subject and subtopic rather than a single percentage.
- Enough volume to stay unseen. A bank you exhaust in a month stops being a diagnostic and becomes a memory test.
Volume without the first two is the common failure. A bank advertising tens of thousands of questions with one-line explanations will keep you busy and teach you very little.
The review loop
Everything above is arrangement. This is the part that does the work, and it takes about as long as answering the questions did:
- Answer a set without stopping to look anything up. Ten to twenty questions, timed. Looking things up mid-set converts a test into a reading exercise.
- Review every question you got wrong, and every one you guessed. A lucky guess is a future mistake wearing a mark.
- Name the failure. Did you not know the rule, misread the facts, or answer a question that was not asked? Those three need different fixes, and the pattern is visible after a fortnight of writing it down.
- Send it back to yourself. Put the topic in a review queue — a day later, then a few days later. If your question bank does not do this for you, a flashcard deck of the rules you missed does the same job.
- Check the pattern weekly. Not the total. One bad subject, or one bad task type, is actionable; a percentage is not.
Free questions, and their limits
Where to find them, and how to judge what else is given away free, is in free SQE1 practice questions.
Start with the SRA’s own sample questions. They are free, they come from the body that sets the exam, and nothing else is as reliable a guide to the style and difficulty you will meet. There are only a couple of hundred of them, so treat them as calibration rather than a programme.
Beyond that, free question sets vary enormously, and the variation is almost entirely in the explanations. Before spending weeks inside one, check three questions: does the explanation cover all five options, does it cite anything, and is it written for the current format?
Our own free warm-up sets are there for exactly that inspection — real questions from the same bank the paid papers draw on, with the full explanation behind every option. Take a free set, and if it does what you need, a pass opens the rest for your sitting and the next one.