May 2026 Recall
MRCPsych Paper B · full mock examination
150 marks · 3 hours · the full paper — one hundred single best answers and fifty extended matching items, across clinical specialties and critical review.
What this paper is
A full-length Paper B under real conditions: 150 marks in three hours, which is seventy-two seconds an item. The split follows the real paper — one hundred single best answers and fifty extended matching items, with one hundred marks on the clinical specialties and fifty on critical review.
Sitting it in one three-hour block is most of the point. Candidates rarely fail Paper B on any single topic. They fail it because concentration goes at the two-hour mark and the last forty items are answered badly. That is a stamina problem, and the only way to train it is to sit the whole thing.
What is in it
Clinical material runs across general adult, old age and neuropsychiatry, child and adolescent, substance misuse, forensic, learning disability, psychotherapy, and the organisation and delivery of care. The critical review half covers study design, bias and confounding, diagnostic test statistics, survival analysis, meta-analysis including network meta-analysis, and health economics.
Six figures carry ten of the items: a network meta-analysis visual abstract, a rate table with confidence intervals, a cumulative event curve with numbers at risk, a Kaplan-Meier continuation curve, a scatter plot, and a two-by-two accuracy table. Click any figure to enlarge it.
How to read your result
Items are tagged Standard, Discriminating or Ceiling. Standard items are the ones you must have; if you are dropping these, go back to the underlying material. Discriminating items separate a safe pass from a comfortable one. Ceiling items are hard on purpose — getting them wrong tells you little, getting them right tells you a great deal.
Your result breaks down by subject area, so you can see whether the problem is forensic, or economics, or old age, rather than a single unhelpful percentage. Work the weakest area first. The answer key is balanced at twenty items per letter, so guessing one letter throughout scores fifteen per cent.
About the questions and figures
Every item was written for this paper and mapped to the Paper B blueprint. Every figure was drawn for this paper from invented data: no figure reproduces one from a published study and no dataset describes real patients. Where a figure follows a standard published form, its caption names the convention so you recognise the same layout in a journal.
Where an answer in wide circulation is wrong, the explanation says so and shows why. Seventeen items carry such a note. If you think an answer is wrong, say so; that is how the paper gets better.
Choose how you sit it
Option 1 — Exam conditions
Timed, no feedback until you submit. 150 marks in three hours, the same seventy-two seconds an item you get on the day. You may change any answer, flag items and move freely. Nothing is revealed until the end.
Option 2 — Timed with feedback
The same clock, but each item marks itself immediately and shows the full explanation. Answers lock once chosen. Use this to build speed without losing the teaching.
Option 3 — Untimed with feedback
No clock, answer revealed as you go. Work at whatever pace you need, reading every explanation in full. Use this to learn the material properly.
Dr Chinonso S. Ezeanyika · Medical Education Specialist · The Complete Doctor Academy
Your result
By subject area
By question type and difficulty
Item by item
All 150 items, what each tested, and whether you got it. Select any item number to revisit it in full.