BSB Criminal Litigation

The assessment is multiple choice. The official Bar Standards Board pages could not be retrieved when this resource was compiled, so the number of questions, the sitting time and whether the paper is delivered on paper or on screen are unconfirmed and flagged for review. Check the current specification with the Bar Standards Board or your course provider before booking.

Difficulty comes from application rather than recall. Most stems are short factual scenarios asking which procedural step is correct, so knowing a definition is rarely enough. Candidates who can move quickly from facts to the governing rule, and who read the call of the question carefully, tend to find the timing manageable. Those who memorise without practising scenarios often run short.

The retake policy could not be verified because the relevant Bar Standards Board pages returned errors at retrieval. Whether resits are permitted, how many attempts are allowed and what fee applies are all unconfirmed here. Treat this as a question for your training provider or the Bar Standards Board directly, and do not rely on second-hand accounts of previous years' rules.

Neither figure can be stated with confidence. The official pages were unavailable, so the pass mark, the total marks available, the duration of the sitting and any scaling arrangements are recorded as unknown and marked for review. Confirm these with your provider before you plan revision timings, because both affect how much practice you need under timed conditions.

Follow the chronology of a criminal case. Start with preliminaries to prosecution and investigation, then bail, remands and custody, then disclosure and unused material. Move to summary trial and allocation, then evidence and exclusion of evidence, then sentencing. Finish with appeals and post-conviction review, which draws on everything before it and makes far more sense once the earlier stages are secure.

Three recur. First, confusing allocation decisions with sentencing powers, so the answer chosen is available in the wrong court. Second, muddling the disclosure tests applied to prosecution and defence material. Third, treating the exclusion of evidence as a single discretion rather than distinguishing the separate routes and their different thresholds. Build comparison tables for each of these pairs and test yourself on them repeatedly.

Shift from reading to answering. Work through scenario questions topic by topic, keeping a log of every error and the reason for it, whether that is a knowledge gap, a misread stem or a timing problem. Then sit full mixed sets under timed conditions. Revisit your error log the day before the examination rather than starting new material at that stage.

No. All questions are original material written for independent study, and this platform has no affiliation with, or endorsement from, the Bar Standards Board. Questions are self-contained and contain no exhibits or external references. Where a rule or figure could not be verified against an official source, it is marked for review rather than presented as settled.

Administrative details are unverified. The Bar Standards Board pages describing the centralised examinations returned errors when this resource was compiled, so question counts, timing, fees, pass marks and retake rules are all flagged for review. Substantive law is likewise subject to change. Always check the current specification and any amendments issued by your provider before the sitting.