The final week before your SQE1 exam is not a time for learning new things — it is a time for consolidation, confidence-building, and preparation. Candidates who use this week well tend to perform better on exam day than their total hours of revision would predict. Candidates who misuse it — cramming new material, doing too many questions for too many hours — often underperform. This guide tells you how to use the last seven days well.
What the Final Week Is For
Broadly, the final week serves two purposes: consolidating what you already know, and managing the psychological transition from revision mode to exam mode. Both matter.
By the final week, your knowledge base is largely set. The marginal value of new information is low — there is not enough time to encode it properly or to practise applying it. The high-value activities in the final week are different from earlier phases of revision:
- Reviewing key rules and definitions that you know but want to feel sharp on
- Running short, targeted practice sessions on your weakest topics
- Reviewing errors from your most recent mock exam
- Resting and recovering cognitive capacity for exam day
A Day-by-Day Final Week Plan
- Day 1 (6 days before exam): Active recall sweep of FLK1 topics. For each subject, write down the five rules you are least confident about, check them, then do 15–20 practice questions on the weakest subject.
- Day 2 (5 days before exam): Same process for FLK2 topics. Focus on the areas your mock review flagged as weak.
- Day 3 (4 days before exam): Targeted practice on the 2–3 topics where your mock exam performance was weakest. 40–50 questions maximum.
- Day 4 (3 days before exam): Light revision only. Flashcards or brief notes for key rules across all subjects. No new topics. Finish by early afternoon.
- Day 5 (2 days before exam): Very light session — review your personal list of “rules I keep forgetting.” Confirm your exam venue, travel, and logistics. Early evening finish.
- Day 6 (day before exam): No revision. Rest completely. Prepare your exam materials. Eat well and sleep at your normal time. Do not stay up late reviewing.
- Day 7 (exam day): Light breakfast. Arrive at the venue with time to spare. No last-minute notes or cramming.
What to Avoid in the Final Week
The common mistakes in the final week are predictable and avoidable:
- Starting new topics for the first time — this adds anxiety without adding useful knowledge
- Doing a full practice exam in the two days before the sitting — this fatigues you without enough time to recover
- Changing your sleep pattern to study later or earlier than usual
- Reading notes obsessively the morning of the exam
“The night before the exam, put your notes away. Everything you have learned is already stored. Your job now is to rest so you can retrieve it.” — widely reported advice from SQE1 tutors and successful candidates.
Exam Day Technique
A few practical points for the exam itself:
- Read each question fully before looking at the answer options — this prevents the options from anchoring your analysis
- On questions where you are unsure, eliminate obviously wrong options first, then make your best choice from the remainder
- Never leave a blank — there is no negative marking
- Pace yourself: 180 questions in 5 hours is 100 seconds per question. Keep an eye on your progress at the midpoint
- If you are badly stuck on a question, mark it and move on — return to it if time allows
Practise on Sqewise
If you are reading this in your final week, the most useful thing you can do is a targeted practice session on Sqewise focused on your weakest topics. Check your progress dashboard to see where to focus, review the topic list for any subjects you haven’t revisited recently, and make sure you’ve completed at least one full mock exam. Good luck.