The rules: attempts and the six-year window
You have three attempts at FLK1 and three at FLK2, counted separately, within a six-year window that begins on the first day of your first SQE assessment. If you passed one paper and failed the other, you have used one attempt at the paper you failed and none at the one you passed.
Two consequences are worth taking seriously. A paper you have passed cannot be resat to improve the mark, so there is nothing to be gained by treating a pass as provisional. And if you exhaust three attempts at a paper, you must wait for the six-year window to expire before applying to start the SQE again — at which point earlier passes do not carry forward. That is the reason not to spend an attempt on a sitting you already suspect you are not ready for.
Reading your results properly
Your results give you a mark, the pass mark for that sitting, and a quintile — which fifth of the cohort you finished in. The quintile is the line that tells you what kind of resit you are facing.
- Quintile 3, a few marks short. The knowledge is broadly there. The losses are usually concentrated in two or three subjects, or in technique under time. Six months is comfortable, and the work is targeted rather than total.
- Quintile 4. Somewhere between coverage and polish. Expect to find whole topics that never got a second pass, and budget more time than feels necessary.
- Quintile 5. Coverage. Doing the same preparation more intensely will not move this; changing what the preparation consists of will.
Whatever the band, the number itself is not the diagnosis. If your preparation was reading-heavy, you probably do not know where your marks went — and that is the first thing to fix. Work a few hundred unseen questions with a breakdown by subject behind them, and the pattern arrives within a fortnight. How to read the pass mark and the scaled score is covered in the pass mark guide.
Three reasons people fail, and their cures
1. Coverage gaps
Whole topics that were read once in month two and never revisited, or subjects quietly skipped because they were unpleasant. The exam has roughly 340 questions to spread across thirteen subject areas — it will find them. The cure is a coverage audit: list every topic on the specification, mark the ones you have never answered questions on, and start there.
2. Technique
You knew the law and picked the second-best answer. This shows up in review as “but that was true too”. It is the most fixable failure of the three, and the fix is deliberate: answer the question before reading the options, and read the explanation for every option, not just the key.
3. Time and stamina
Marks lost at the end of a session, or questions left blank. Usually caused by spending four minutes on a handful of questions you refused to abandon. The cure is timed sets and full mocks in the real session shape, sat at the time of day you will actually sit them.
Planning the resit
Between two sittings you have about six months. A structure that works:
- Weeks 1–2: diagnose. Two hundred unseen questions across the whole paper, timed, with a breakdown by subject. Do not revise first — you are measuring, and revising first spoils the measurement.
- Weeks 3–12: rebuild the weak half. Take the bottom half of your subject list and cover it properly, each topic ending in questions on that topic the same day.
- Weeks 13–20: mixed practice. Sets across everything, mistakes returning on a schedule, weekly check of the pattern rather than the total.
- Final 4 weeks: mocks. Two or three full timed papers in the session shape, each followed by a review long enough to produce a list of topics to close.
Note what is not in that plan: re-reading the notes you made last time. You already know that material to the level that reading produced, and it was not enough.
When to book
Book when you have a mock result you would be happy to repeat, not when the deadline appears in your inbox. A comfortable signal is the low 70s on unseen, timed questions with no subject conspicuously below the rest.
If you are one attempt from the end of the road on a paper, weigh a further six months against the irreversibility of a third failure. Nobody regrets having been ready.
Our own resit path starts by finding out where the marks went: a diagnostic, then a daily plan built round the subjects it exposes, with every mistake coming back until it is fixed. Start with a free warm-up set.