This workflow is for cardiology trainees using BMJ OnExamination to revise for the European Examination in Core Cardiology (EECC) who want structure without exhausting their bank too early. The EECC is a single written knowledge paper, so a well-built MCQ bank maps directly to its format — the risk is not the modality but the method. The principal limitation to plan around is that once you have seen a bank's items, they no longer measure you honestly; this plan uses BMJ OnExamination to learn and covers the exam, while reserving a protected unseen pool for a truthful final read.
What BMJ OnExamination offers for EECC right now
BMJ OnExamination lists a dedicated EECC product among its European specialty exams. The following are vendor-reported figures, checked 20 July 2026 — confirm the live numbers on the product page before you rely on them:
- Bank size: around 300 EECC questions, including roughly 50 image-based items across cardiology topics such as ischaemic heart disease, rhythm disorders, adult congenital heart disease and non-invasive investigation (vendor-reported; verify the current count).
- Format practised: best-of-five multiple-choice, matching the EECC's single-best-answer style, with editorial explanations.
- Personalisation: difficulty-level selection, revision plans and performance feedback with peer comparison and a leaderboard. Note that BMJ OnExamination advertises candidate-directed customisation and analytics rather than a verified adaptive-difficulty engine — this article makes no proprietary-algorithm claims on its behalf.
- Access: subscription tiers from one to twelve months (verify current pricing on the product page), an offline app, and a free daily trial of a small number of questions.
Treat "adaptive" here as you steering difficulty and topic, informed by analytics — not a black box choosing for you. That distinction matters for the plan below, because the discipline has to come from you.
Exam anchor: what the EECC actually is
The EECC, run under the ESC and UEMS, is 120 multiple-choice questions, each with five options and a single best answer, with no negative marking, sat in three hours with no break. It is delivered by online proctoring (CYIM/ProctorU) on your own computer, in English, once a year (the 2026 sitting was 16 June 2026). It is blueprinted against the ESC Core Curriculum for the Cardiologist (2020), and eligibility is determined by your National or Affiliated Cardiac Society, typically once you have completed core training.
Two things follow. First, this is a written knowledge exam — there is no OSCE or viva to simulate, so your job is breadth of recall and clinical reasoning under a three-hour clock, not consultation skills. Second, the official curriculum and any ESC sample material are the requirements; a vendor's topic list is a convenience, not the blueprint. Distinguish the two, and audit your coverage against the ESC curriculum rather than against BMJ OnExamination's contents.
Baseline week: measure before you personalise
Before you let any analytics, difficulty selection or revision plan shape your feed, take a small, blueprint-stratified unseen sample and sit it cold and timed — a modest block spread across the major ESC curriculum areas (coronary, heart failure, arrhythmia, valvular, congenital, imaging, prevention). This gives you a per-area starting accuracy that is not yet contaminated by having seen the questions. Keep this baseline. It is the only clean "before" you will get, and it is what the exit criteria compare against.
First pass: set domain floors so the score cannot lie
Work through BMJ OnExamination in a first pass with domain floors. Decide, in advance, a minimum number of questions and a minimum unseen accuracy for each ESC curriculum area, and do not let a rising overall percentage stand in for an unattempted area. The failure mode this prevents is well known: you drill the domains you enjoy, the headline number climbs, and two curriculum areas quietly sit at zero questions attempted. Use the difficulty-selection and revision-plan features to serve the floors — not to wander toward comfortable topics. A floor unmet is a domain uncovered, whatever the overall figure says.
Error taxonomy: name the mistake before you fix it
Every miss is not the same, and the correct fix depends on the type. Tag each wrong answer as one of:
- Knowledge gap — you did not know the fact or mechanism.
- Misread stem — you knew it but misread the question or the lead-in.
- Premature closure — you locked onto a diagnosis before reading the discriminating detail.
- Guideline error — you applied outdated or non-ESC guidance.
- Calculation error — a numerical or formula slip.
- Time-pressure error — a mistake you would not have made with more clock.
The distribution tells you what to change. A pile of misread-stem and premature-closure tags is a technique problem that more content will not fix; a pile of guideline errors is a currency problem pointing you back to the source.
Review interval: not everything deserves an immediate repeat
Match the corrective action to the error type rather than re-doing the same item straight away:
- Knowledge gaps deserve a short, targeted source read (the relevant ESC guideline or curriculum section), then a new transfer question on the same principle later — not a re-run of the item whose answer you now remember.
- Misread and premature-closure errors deserve a technique note and spaced re-testing under time, because the fix is process, not facts.
- Guideline errors deserve a dated source check so you learn the current recommendation, not the one the explanation happened to cite.
- Calculation errors deserve a handful of fresh numerical items to rebuild fluency.
Immediately repeating a failed question mostly teaches you to recognise that question. Spacing the repeat, and testing the principle on a new stem, teaches you the content.
Mixed-block switch: stop cueing yourself
Topic-filtered practice is useful early, when a foundation is genuinely weak, because it lets you build a block of knowledge. But the heading is a cue the real exam never gives you. Switch from topic-filtered to timed, random, mixed blocks once a domain has met its floor and its unseen accuracy is stable. The trigger is objective: floor met, accuracy holding across two separated sittings, pacing on track. After that, staying in topic-filtered mode is comfort, not progress.
Exit criteria: what "ready" means
You are ready to stop using the bank as your main activity when — and only when — all of these hold, not when you have completed 100% of the items:
- Coverage floor met in every ESC curriculum area, with no area left thin.
- Stable first-attempt performance on unseen, timed, mixed blocks, at or above your target.
- Pacing comfortable for 120 questions in three hours, with time to review flagged items.
- Retention holding on areas you closed earlier, tested on delayed re-exposure.
- Official-material calibration — you have sat any ESC/EECC sample material and your performance on it agrees with your bank performance.
Completion alone proves you saw every item once; it does not prove any of the above.
Worked example: a seven-day plan around clinical work
A realistic week for a busy trainee, using BMJ OnExamination for one defined job — building and covering written knowledge — and iatroX as the protected unseen layer for transfer practice. No claims are made about either platform's internal algorithms.
- Monday: 30-minute timed unseen baseline block spread across two weak ESC areas; tag every miss by error type.
- Tuesday: targeted first-pass questions in the weakest area to its floor; short ESC source read on the top two knowledge gaps.
- Wednesday: spaced retrieval of Monday's and Tuesday's misses as new items; log high-confidence errors.
- Thursday: second weak area to floor; a set of image-based items to keep interpretation sharp.
- Friday: a fresh, timed mixed block in iatroX on the same principles — unseen transfer questions you have not met in BMJ OnExamination, so the number actually measures you.
- Saturday: review only; convert misread/premature-closure errors into technique notes; date-check any guideline error.
- Sunday: rest, or a light re-test of the week's closed topics to confirm retention.
The division of labour is the point: one bank to learn and cover, a separate protected pool to measure, so your final read is honest.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue BMJ OnExamination if curriculum areas remain below floor — you have unmet coverage to build.
- Supplement with a second, protected unseen source (this is where iatroX fits) once you need honest measurement, or with an ESC source for a stubborn guideline gap.
- Switch emphasis to full-length timed mixed mocks when coverage and retention are solid but pacing is untested.
- Stop adding new questions when the exit criteria are met; further volume then adds fatigue, not readiness. Base every choice on the measured gap, not on novelty or on how much subscription time is left.
Frequently asked questions
Is BMJ OnExamination enough for EECC on its own? It can be a strong core for the written-knowledge job if its coverage maps onto every ESC Core Curriculum area and you still keep a protected pool of unseen questions for honest measurement, because a single bank you have fully worked through can no longer tell you where you stand. The vendor-reported bank of around 300 EECC items (checked 20 July 2026; verify the current count) is a reasonable foundation, but most candidates pair a primary bank with a second unseen source so their final percentage is not inflated by re-seen items.
Which EECC component does BMJ OnExamination not reproduce well? The EECC is a single written MCQ paper, so there is no separate clinical or oral component for any bank to reproduce — the honest gaps are elsewhere. A finite bank does not reproduce a full, unseen 120-question three-hour proctored sitting once you have cycled its items, and no third-party bank can guarantee currency with the very latest ESC guideline updates, so verify guideline-sensitive answers against the current ESC source rather than trusting an explanation's cited date.
How many BMJ OnExamination questions should I complete per day for EECC? There is no universal number; set a daily volume you can review properly, because unreviewed questions teach little. A common sustainable pattern around clinical work is one or two focused blocks a day with time reserved to tag errors and space repeats, adjusted so you meet each domain floor before the exam rather than racing to finish the bank. Quality of review, not raw count, is what moves unseen accuracy.
When should I stop using BMJ OnExamination and move to mixed mocks? Move to timed mixed mocks when every ESC curriculum area has met its coverage floor and its unseen accuracy is stable across two separated sittings, even if some individual questions remain unattempted. Staying in topic-filtered mode past that point trains you to answer with the heading as a cue, which the real exam never provides; the switch to random, timed blocks is what builds exam-condition performance and pacing.
How should I combine BMJ OnExamination with iatroX without duplicating practice? Give each a distinct job under the two-Q-bank rule: use BMJ OnExamination as the learning-and-coverage bank, and keep iatroX as the protected measurement layer for fresh, timed, unseen transfer questions on the same cardiology principles — never re-doing the same item in both. iatroX does not publish an EECC-specific bank, so treat it as the general cardiology-knowledge and unseen-MCQ measurement layer that keeps your readiness signal honest, not as a second copy of the same EECC content.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 20 July 2026. Platform figures (bank size, features, pricing) are vendor-reported and were correct to the best of our reading of the BMJ OnExamination product page on 20 July 2026; they change without notice, so verify the current count and price before relying on them. Exam-format details are from the ESC/UEMS EECC pages. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing question-bank and clinical-knowledge platform; this article confines iatroX to the unseen-measurement and general-knowledge layer and does not claim it publishes an EECC-specific bank or reproduces BMJ OnExamination's content. No claims are made about any vendor's internal or proprietary algorithms. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: ESC — European Exam in Core Cardiology (escardio.org) and UEMS Cardiology (uems-cardio.eu/eecc); BMJ OnExamination EECC product page (onexamination.com); iatroX EECC/UK quiz hub (https://www.iatrox.com/quiz-landing); iatroX comparison hub (https://www.iatrox.com/compare); "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score" (https://www.iatrox.com/blog/qbank-percentage-not-your-exam-score); "The two-Q-bank rule" (https://www.iatrox.com/blog/the-two-q-bank-rule-how-to-add-a-second-bank-without-duplicating-questions-or-destroying-calibration).