RANZCP MCQ Exam

No. This is an independent study resource. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists. All questions and explanations are original material written for practice, and nothing here should be treated as official College guidance on the examination.

We cannot confirm this. The College's assessment pages were not accessible when this page was compiled, so item counts, timing and section structure are not reproduced. Check the College's current exams and assessments pages, or your training program correspondence, before you plan your pacing strategy around any assumed figure.

Not stated in the material available to us, so we do not publish a pass mark or retake policy. Both are set by the College and can change between administrations. Confirm the current standard and any attempt limits directly with the College rather than relying on figures from older candidates or forum posts.

Start with the domains where your clinical exposure is thinnest rather than the ones you enjoy. Psychopathology and assessment underpin everything else, so secure that early. Then rotate through adult, old age, child and adolescent, consultation-liaison, forensic and addiction topics, keeping pharmacology and neurosciences running throughout rather than leaving them to the end.

Expect applied rather than recall-based difficulty. Questions typically describe a clinical scenario and ask for the most likely diagnosis, the next step, or the safest management, so recognising a term is not enough. Distractors are usually plausible and partly correct, which rewards candidates who can discriminate between competing options and justify why the others fail.

Answer before checking, commit to a choice, then write one line explaining why each distractor is wrong. Review errors by theme rather than by question, so repeated weaknesses in, say, psychopharmacology or old-age assessment become visible. Space repeat attempts over weeks instead of doing blocks back to back, and keep a short error log you revisit before each session.

Three patterns recur: misreading the stem's actual task, such as answering what the diagnosis is when the question asks for the next management step; ignoring safety and risk considerations in favour of a descriptive diagnosis; and over-committing to a single favoured diagnosis when the vignette deliberately includes features of two conditions. Slowing down on the final sentence of each stem helps.

Yes. The practice set is organised around general adult psychiatry, psychopathology and assessment, biological treatments and psychopharmacology, psychotherapies, child and adolescent psychiatry, psychiatry of old age, consultation-liaison psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, addiction psychiatry, and neurosciences with relevant medical knowledge, so you can practise each area separately or in mixed sets.

Use the College's own website, specifically its training, exams and assessments section, and any correspondence sent to you as a registered trainee. Because published details are revised periodically, always take the current version from the College as authoritative. If a figure here or anywhere else conflicts with the College's current published information, follow the College.