FCPS-I in 90 Days: A Study Plan for Working House Officers

Most FCPS-I candidates are house officers or fresh graduates who cannot study eight hours a day. Ninety days is long enough if two things are true: you study every day, even on call, and you spend most of that time answering questions rather than reading. This plan assumes about two hours on weekdays and six hours across each weekend, which comes to roughly 230 hours. It is written for the 5 January 2027 sitting; shift the dates for April, July or October.

Before day 1: choose the subject group and do a baseline

FCPS-I is taken in one of eleven subject groups, and the basic-science emphasis differs between, say, Medicine and Allied and Surgery and Allied. Decide the group first, then sit a 100-question timed mock in that group with no preparation. The score does not matter; the per-subject breakdown does, because it sets the order below.

Days 1–30: foundations, weakest first

• Order the basic sciences from your weakest to your strongest and work through them in that order: typically anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, biochemistry and microbiology, with the clinical foundation of your group alongside.
• Daily target: 60 questions, topic-wise, with every explanation read. On call days, 30 questions on your phone counts; zero does not.
• Weekends: two three-hour sessions, each covering one system end to end with its question set.
• Keep an error log. One line per mistake: fact, reason, fix.

Days 31–60: second pass and mixed practice

• Repeat the subjects in the same order but faster, using the error log to decide what to re-read.
• Daily target: 80 questions, half topic-wise and half mixed across all subjects.
• Weekends: one timed 100-question paper on Saturday, analysed on Sunday. By day 60 you will have done four papers.
• Start the high-yield lists in week 7: drug adverse effects, microbiology associations, genetic syndromes, embryology derivatives and the community-medicine statistics that reappear every sitting.

Days 61–83: mock phase

• Two full papers a week (a Paper I and a Paper II back to back on one weekend day, exactly like the exam sessions), each followed by a full analysis.
• Weekday work: the error log, plus 50 mixed questions. No new books, no new videos.
• Fix your pace: 25 questions every 30 minutes, with a rule for moving on from a question that is taking longer than two minutes.

Days 84–90: taper

Light revision of the error log and the high-yield lists; one short mixed block a day; the admit card printed; sleep. Travel to the centre city the day before if it is not your own.

Rules that keep the plan alive

1. Never skip two days in a row. A missed day is recoverable; a missed week restarts the subject.
2. Questions before reading. Read the textbook paragraph an explanation points to, not the chapter.
3. One resource per subject. Switching question banks mid-plan resets your sense of difficulty.
4. Analyse every mock. A mock without analysis is a day lost, not a day practised.

What this means for you

Ninety days of this routine produces roughly 6,000 answered questions and eight timed papers, which is the volume FAME's teaching team sees in candidates who pass at the first attempt. FAME's FCPS-1 specialty-wise plans supply the subject order, the question sets and the timed papers used in this schedule.

Questions candidates ask about the plan

What if I can manage only an hour a day? Stretch the first two phases to 120 days and keep the four-week mock phase exactly as it is; the mock phase is the part that cannot be compressed. Thirty questions a day with explanations still adds up to 3,600 questions over four months.

Where do recalls fit? After the first pass, organised by system beside the question bank. Recalls show emphasis and style; they are not a syllabus, and a candidate who studies only recalls meets a paper that has moved on.

Sources and references

• CPSP: Examinations schedule (FCPS-I 2027 dates)
• CPSP: FCPS-I notification (format and subject groups)