MSRA past papers & official practice questions

There has only ever been one official MSRA practice paper produced by NHS England. This was released in 2022, then re-released in 2023 with the controversial airport question removed.

There has, however, been a spate of other releases: applicant guides, practice papers for adjacent medical Situational Judgement Tests (SJT), all containing practice questions written by the Work Psychology Group (WPG) - the same group that develop and write the MSRA.

This is a treasure trove of practice material, no other questions can give you the same confidence that you are learning the judgement that the exam writers expect of you for the official MSRA.

Over the past 13 years we have been collecting this material: 14 papers in total, some of which have been lost over time, but have been preserved by our team. They contain 289 medical SJT questions in total, all with an available answer key. We have decided to make them all freely available here, so everyone can access them.

We have also digitised this entire collection, so you can have automatic scoring, track your progress over time and see how your performance compares against other MSRA applicants. We are also making this available for free, you can try it out here. We plan to use your responses to these questions to produce the first fully validated MSRA SJT question bank.

There exists a confidential bank of questions which are used to construct MSRA papers. Every year a handful of new questions are added to it, if they have passed piloting.

Official past papers are not released as this would remove a substantial amount of questions from this bank which could not be reused.

This is also why NHS England are hesitant to release more practice papers. MSRA SJT questions are expensive to produce, and undergo a rigorous validation cycle before they are included in the official bank.

Some third-party question banks claim to offer past papers. This normally consists of questions that have been gleaned from applicants recalling their recent sitting. We believe that without an official answer key this practice material lacks value, as the "correct" answer is the best guess of a third-party exam writer, not that of the official exam. What you'd actually be practicing is to model the judgement of that third-party exam writer.

In fact, we believe that all third-party MSRA SJT practice material lacks value for the same reason and is likely to worsen performance, as you learn the habits and judgement of the third-party writer, not of the official MSRA exam writers.

This is why we have set about to make the only fully validated MSRA SJT question bank. By using robust statistical methods of validation and mimicing the WPG's own SJT development process, we can ensure our questions are consistent with the official exam.

These papers assess judgement at F1 level, where the expected degree of escalation, supervision and independence differs subtly from the F2 standard the MSRA marks against. They're excellent volume for learning the WPG's general patterns of reasoning - just don't treat every answer as a perfect template for the MSRA.

Start with the F2-level material: the two MSRA practice papers, the applicant guide questions, and the three F2 Stand-alone papers. These 53 questions are the only public material at the exact level the exam marks you against. Do them slowly, and spend as long on the official rationales as on the questions themselves - the rationales are where the exam's model of judgement is actually spelled out.

Then move to the Foundation Programme and FMProC papers for volume, keeping the F1 caveat in mind. By the end you'll have seen all 289 official questions - every validated SJT question that exists publicly.

Or save time with automatic marking and see how you rank compared to other 2027 applicants with our free question bank. Contains all 289 official practice questions.