How to Conquer the FRACP Written Exam (While Still Having a Life)
Let’s be honest about the real villain of the FRACP written exam. It’s not immunology. It’s not the endless list of monoclonal antibodies ending in “-mab.” The true boss battle is finding time to study while working a full-time job stacked with night shifts, overtime, and the occasional existential crisis at 3 AM on the ward.
So here’s the mindset shift: stop waiting for the perfect study day to arrive. Spoiler alert— it never does. Instead, ‘smuggle’ little pockets of study into your workday and aim for 1–2 hours of study at work every single day.
Turn “Downtime” at Work Into Gold
Those quiet moments between admissions? That’s exam ammunition. Here’s how to use them:
– Watch the 40-minute college lectures. Perfect for a lunch break or a lull on a quiet shift.
– Join a study group — meet regularly, divide the workload, and prepare your group answers together. Misery (and MCQs) love company.
– Read around your patients’ cases. Got a real-world scleroderma patient in bed 4? Congratulations — your clinical exam just became your study session.
– Smash out online MCQs whenever you’ve got five spare minutes.
– Show up to Hospital Teaching, Journal Clubs & Grand Rounds. You’ll walk away with at least one new fact every time and you never know which of those nuggets will magically appear on the exam paper.
How Do You Eat an Elephant?
One bite at a time. 🐘
Build your study hours up gradually. Go too hard too early and you’ll burn out spectacularly by exam week. Start too late and you’ll “miss the boat” and spend the final month in blind panic. The sweet spot? Steady, consistent effort.
Here’s the science bit: space your study out across the whole year. Spaced repetition means you’ll actually remember the material instead of cramming it into short-term memory where it evaporates the moment you walk into the exam hall.
And one more thing — take every single hour of study leave you can get your hands on. You earned it. Use it.
The Ultimate FRACP Study Resource Toolkit
Now for the good stuff. Here are the resources, hand-picked specifically for the FRACP written exam.
🎓 RACP College Lectures (College Learning Series)
Since 2018, the college rolled out the RACP College Learning Series (CLS) — an interactive online resource built to support Basic Trainees across Australia and New Zealand. Register through the official RACP website to subscribe.
Why these matter: these lectures are pure gold. They give you a skeleton framework for revision and, crucially, reveal exactly what the college expects you to know. Translation? These topics are high-yield. Study hard around them. The CLS is currently supplemented by the older PEP lecture series, also available on the college site.
👉 Golden rule: Work through ALL of them, and build your own study notes as you go.
🔗 https://elearning.racp.edu.au/login/index.php
📚 MKSAP (USA)
Grab a digital copy via their official website.
A word of warning: MKSAP questions are a touch easier than the real FRACP beast, so don’t let them lull you into false confidence. That said, they’re a fantastic starting point and a great confidence builder.
The genius feature? Questions are broken down by subtopic. So you can study scleroderma, then immediately test yourself on scleroderma MCQs. Learn → test → repeat.
⚠️ Heads up: For certain topics — especially antibiotic choices in infectious diseases — the American guidelines diverge completely from Australian practice. Treat those sections with caution.
https://www.acponline.org/featured-products/acp-mksap
(First visit? You’ll need to create an ACP account to access the content.)
💡 UpToDate (USA)
An outstanding revision resource — but the information is vast, so be ruthlessly selective. Don’t try to read the whole thing (you’ll age a decade).
Best use: chasing down those tricky, specific topics you simply can’t find answers to anywhere else.
🔗 https://www.uptodate.com/home
💊 Australian Therapeutic Guidelines
The Australian Therapeutic Guidelines publish pocket books covering most subjects — and there’s a mini version you can keep right on your phone for study on the fly.
These guidelines are the perfect companion to your MKSAP and UpToDate therapeutics reading, because they keep your revision firmly aligned with current Australasian practice (which is what the exam cares about).
🔍 Pro tip: Don’t skip the key references used to build these guidelines — they’re a sneaky source of potential exam questions.
🔗 http://www.tg.org.au/
(A free resource summarising the management of common conditions in primary care is also available here.)
📰 Recommended Medical Journals
Keep these on your radar — reading the right articles can genuinely swing your result:
– The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM)
– The Lancet
– Internal Medicine Journal
– The British Medical Journal (BMJ)
– Medical Journal of Australia (MJA)
– New Zealand Medical Journal
– Cochrane Reviews
– Annals of Internal Medicine
Your focus: review articles and clinical practice articles — these are the most exam-relevant.
🕵️ Pssst..The whisper on the wards: rumour has it the college pulls from journal articles published in the last two years before the exam to generate questions. So keep your eyes peeled, for that fresh landmark trial could be your golden ticket. 🎟️
You’ve got this. The FRACP written exam isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about consistency, smart resource use, and showing up for yourself a little bit every day. One bite at a time. 🐘
👉 Click HERE for more exam tips and resources