How to study for the MRCOG
A resit costs you the exam fee and six months. Most candidates who fail did put the hours in. They just spent them re-reading material they already knew instead of finding the material they did not. This is the method the platform is built around, whether you have six months or six weeks.
- Step 1
Find out where you actually stand
Start with a broad practice run across every knowledge area rather than the topics you already enjoy. Your topic heatmap fills in as you answer, turning a vague sense of "I'm weak on statistics" into a number you can act on.
Tip: Resist the urge to revise before you have baseline data. An hour of answering tells you more about where to spend the next month than an hour of reading does.
- Step 2
Revise from guideline-grounded notes
Each revision note is written against the actual RCOG and NICE guideline text, not a model's unverified memory of it. Every clinical claim is either traceable to a real guideline excerpt or explicitly flagged as ungrounded, so you always know what you are learning from.
Tip: Read the note before the questions on a topic you have never covered, and after the questions on one you have. Both work; doing neither does not.
- Step 3
Ask when you get stuck, instead of moving on
The AI study assistant answers from the guideline corpus rather than the open internet. Ask why a distractor was wrong, how a threshold was derived, or what changed between guideline versions, and get an answer that cites where it came from.
Tip: The best time to ask is the moment you get a question wrong and cannot articulate why. That gap is the thing the exam will find.
- Step 4
Use the dead time
Guidelines with an audio overview are available as a two-host conversational episode you can listen to on a commute, between clinics, or on a ward round walk. It is the same guideline content in a format that survives a noisy environment.
Tip: Audio pairs best with a topic you have already read once. First exposure works better on the page; consolidation works fine in your ears.
- Step 5
Drill your weak topics against the clock
Once your heatmap shows the gaps, practise those topics specifically, and switch the timer on. Knowing the answer and knowing it in ninety seconds are different skills, and only one of them is examined.
Tip: Start untimed while a topic is still new. Add the clock once you are getting most of them right, not before; timing a topic you have not learned just teaches you to panic.
- Step 6
Let spaced repetition handle the remembering
Smart Review schedules each question with FSRS, the same algorithm behind Anki 23.10+, so material resurfaces just as you are about to forget it. You stop re-reading things you already know and stop losing things you learned in March.
Tip: Clear your due reviews before starting new questions. A backlog of overdue cards quietly undoes weeks of work.
- Step 7
Sit full mocks under real conditions
Full-length timed mocks mirror the real paper structure, with a question navigator and flagging so you can practise triage as well as recall. Your results break down by topic, so each mock also re-points your revision.
Tip: Phone in another room, no pausing, one sitting. A mock you interrupted tells you what you know but nothing about how you will hold up on the day.
- Step 8Part 3
Rehearse OSCE stations out loud
Part 3 stations run as a live role-play: the simulated patient or colleague responds to what you actually say, then you get a structured mark against the station's own domains. Communication is a performance skill, and reading about it does not build it.
Tip: Speak your answers aloud even when practising alone. The gap between what you know and what you can say under pressure only closes with reps.
Fitting it around a rota
None of the above assumes a free evening. Questions are cached for offline use, so a signal-free tube journey or a hospital corridor still counts as revision time. Ten answered questions between cases, done consistently, beats a heroic weekend you cancel when you get called in.
Start with your baseline
Answer your first set of questions and see where the gaps actually are.
Get startedMRCOG AI is an independent educational tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG).