How to Pass SQE1

SQE1 is 360 single best answer questions across two exam days — FLK1 and FLK2, 180 questions each. That's a lot to hold in your head. Here's how I'd actually approach it.

1. Memorise the law you actually need — not everything you've read

The syllabus for each paper tells you exactly what's examinable. Stick to it. Reading full textbook chapters and writing notes on all of it takes way too long, and most of what's in there you'll never actually be asked about. You need the law that's on the spec for whichever paper you're revising, memorised properly — not a general sense of the subject from a 40-page chapter.

Luckily, I've already done the syllabus-mapping part for you — the SQE Master Workbook: FLK1 and SQE Master Workbook: FLK2 are both built question by question against the actual SQE1 specification, so you're only ever writing notes on what you actually need to know.

2. Practise the actual question format

Single best answer questions are their own skill. You're picking the best of five options against a scenario, not recalling a definition off the page — that's a completely different skill to reading. The SRA publish sample questions so you can see exactly what you're up against. Practise on those, then keep practising against questions and scenarios mapped to the real syllabus — not generic mocks that might not even be testing what's actually examinable.

3. KNOW the easy stuff properly

Ethics is the one everyone underestimates. It's not tested as its own section on either paper — it turns up randomly inside scenario questions across every area of both FLK1 and FLK2, so you can't predict when it'll show up or skip it because "it's not that topic's day." The good news is it's genuinely one of the easier parts of SQE1 once you actually know it. Get it down properly and you've picked up marks a lot of other candidates will drop, purely because they didn't expect it to turn up there.