MCA Oral Exam Reports: How to use them

So you went onto our Facebook page and downloaded a bunch of our free oral reports. Good job! That’s a really good step toward preparing for your own MCA Oral Exam.

Now what? How can you take advantage of the oral reports to make sure that you smash your exam?

1) Use them

Sounds obvious… but use them!

Our oral reports are incredibly valuable for helping you to calibrate your studies. The syllabus is big and can be intimidating but the oral reports help us to understand the level of depth required in the different areas of the syllabus and to understand the types of questions that could be asked.

2) Don’t fixate on one Examiner

Some oral reports will name the MCA oral Examiner, although a lot of other ones will be anonymous. One mistake that we see candidates making is that they get very focused on the questions which their supposed Examiner tends to ask.

This is a mistake because the Examiner can change very frequently, even up to the day of the exam itself. So, although it’s useful to gauge which questions your supposed Examiner often asks, it’s really vital that you don’t get drawn into only thinking about their questions.

Don’t forget that we’re revising for the exam and for the syllabus. We’re not revising for one Examiner.

3) Get lots

Every individual oral report is inevitably going to be biased and partial because it’s one person’s recollection of a fairly challenging hour or so, which could have happened days or weeks before the report was written. It’s therefore really important that you don’t get too obsessed about one comment or question on any one report, particularly if that report seems to be a little odd in terms of the questions that might have been asked.

We don’t know what happened in the exam that day. We don’t know what the candidate said that may have provoked a question in a certain direction. We also don’t know whether what the candidate wrote is simply a mistake because people who pass rarely get everything 100% correct in their exam.

The best way to use oral reports for your MCA oral exam is to get as many reports as you can find, look across them as a whole and determine which questions come up all the time, which questions come up often and which hardly come up at all. If you’ve looked at two dozen reports and on one, there’s this very, very strange question, don’t focus on it, focus on the core content and study to pass the exam, not the report.

The final part of the puzzle

Don’t forget that just having oral reports isn’t enough. They will guide you in terms of how much detail you need to know about each part of the syllabus but you also need access to best-in-class and regularly updated content to study from and opportunities to practise answering questions before the real exam. For deck candidates, this is where our weekly small-group clinics come in and we also offer flexible private sessions for both deck and engine candidates.