MRCS Part B — Study Plan

Why the plan is split. There is no overall pass mark for the OSCE. Candidates must pass Applied Knowledge (160 marks) and Applied Skills (180 marks) in a single sitting, and failing one does not let you bank the other. A strong section cannot compensate for a weak one.

So every session below carries both, and the marks each session covers are counted against its own section rather than against a single 340-mark total. How Part B is scored →

The sequence

Why this order

Knowledge — 160 marks, one hurdle

Blueprint slot	Stations per circuit	Marks per circuit	Stations to revise	Marks per station studied
Surgical pathology	2	40	4	10.0
Interpretation of visual information	1	20	3	6.7
Interpretation of written data	1	20	4	5.0
Critical care	1	20	6	3.3
Surgical anatomy	3	60	23	2.6
Knowledge section	8	160	40	—

Skills — 180 marks, one hurdle

Blueprint slot	Stations per circuit	Marks per circuit	Stations to revise	Marks per station studied
Giving information to another health professional	1	20	3	6.7
Generic procedural skills	2	40	7	5.7
Physical examination	3	60	11	5.5
History taking	2	40	10	4.0
Giving information to a patient or relative	1	20	7	2.9
Skills section	9	180	38	—

A slot’s marks per circuit divided by the number of stations that could fill it gives what each station studied is worth. Pathology sits at the top of Knowledge because 40 marks ride on a pool of four stations; anatomy sits at the bottom because 60 marks are spread over 23.
Within each section, sessions interleave slots rather than blocking them, so no sitting is spent entirely on prosections.
Marks per station studied are comparable within a section, not across the two. Twelve Skills marks and twelve Knowledge marks are not interchangeable, because the sections are passed separately.
This ranks revision order, not importance. Every station in the library is in the plan; none is dropped.
Appendix stations are excluded, since their presence in the current rotation is unconfirmed.
The 17-station, 340-mark structure and the domain allocations come from ICBSE’s Guide to the intercollegiate MRCS examination (August 2021); the two-hurdle rule from Standard Setting in the MRCS Part B (OSCE). Which book station fills which blueprint slot is AMaC’s mapping, not the Colleges’.