BMJ OnExamination is a strong option for trainees revising the European Examination in Core Cardiology (EECC) around clinical work, and — contrary to what you might assume — it does list an EECC bank on its exam menu. This audit is for the candidate who trusts the platform's dashboard too much. Its personalisation engine optimises revision efficiency and peer benchmarking, not exam readiness; the two are not the same, and confusing them is the principal risk here.
What BMJ OnExamination offers for the EECC right now
Coverage first, because it is the usual sticking point: on the date checked, onexamination.com listed EECC among its exams, so this is a genuine analytics audit, not a coverage-gap piece. The box below is vendor-reported and should be re-checked on the product page.
| Item | What the vendor states (20 July 2026) |
|---|---|
| EECC coverage | Yes — EECC appears on the exam menu, offered from "1 Month Access £69.99" |
| Live EECC question count | Not disclosed per exam on the pages checked — verify the current count on the product page |
| Access period | Sold in monthly access blocks (e.g. one month); longer periods typical — verify |
| Adaptive/personalisation | "High Impact Questions" ranked by four stated factors — Social, Subject Matter Experts, Exam Intelligence, Behavioural — plus daily personalised questions and filters by topic, type, difficulty and keyword |
| Analytics | Performance graphs, peer comparison that "indicates how likely you are to pass", learning-point summaries, mock exams matching format/time/number/spread |
| Price | EECC from £69.99 for one month (vendor-reported) |
Two things to hold onto. The engine BMJ OnExamination markets is a ranking and prioritisation layer — it surfaces "high-impact" material and adapts to your interaction patterns — not a psychometric adaptive-difficulty test, and the vendor does not publish the internal weighting, so we make no proprietary-algorithm claims about it. And the per-exam EECC question count is not published on the pages checked, so verify it rather than assuming parity with the platform's larger MRCP banks.
The EECC blueprint: what you are actually being tested on
The EECC is set by the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) with UEMS. It is a written knowledge exam: 120 multiple-choice questions, five options each, single best answer, with no negative marking, sat in one three-hour session with no break. It is delivered online with remote proctoring on the candidate's own computer, run once a year (June) in English, and it is aligned to the ESC Core Curriculum for the Cardiologist (2020). There is no OSCE or viva — the whole exam is the written paper, which is precisely why a well-built MCQ bank is the right tool for it.
The ESC Core Curriculum spans clinical cardiology and risk, coronary and ischaemic heart disease, heart failure and cardiomyopathies, arrhythmias and device therapy, valvular heart disease, adult congenital heart disease, pericardial and myocardial disease, aortic and vascular disease, non-invasive and invasive imaging, hypertension, pulmonary hypertension and embolism, endocarditis, pregnancy and heart disease, and cardiac pharmacology. The ESC does not publish a granular public per-domain question weighting for the EECC, so — as with any blueprint audit — the honest axis is thematic coverage across those chapters, not an invented "so many questions in valves".
Every metric on the dashboard, defined
Analytics only help if you know exactly what each number means. Before you let the home screen steer your week, define the metrics:
- First-attempt accuracy: your percentage on questions you have never seen. This is the only accuracy figure that approximates readiness.
- Repeat accuracy: your percentage on questions you have answered before. It rises with familiarity and systematically overstates knowledge.
- Percentile / peer comparison: where you sit against other users of the same bank — a self-selected, variably-prepared cohort, not the EECC standard-setting cohort.
- Pass-likelihood indicator: a modelled signal the vendor derives from your usage. Read it as motivation, never as a prediction; the exam is standard-set independently of any bank.
- Coverage: the share of the pool you have attempted — a volume measure, not a mastery measure.
- Difficulty: usually the cohort's success rate on an item, which tells you how others found it, not how well you understand the concept.
- Time per item: minutes per question against the exam's roughly 90-seconds-per-question pace over three hours.
The trap is reading repeat accuracy and percentile as readiness. They are the two most flattering numbers on any dashboard and the two least connected to an unseen, timed paper — the reason bank percentage is not your exam score.
Why the personalisation feed skews your percentages
A feed that surfaces "high-impact" questions and adapts to your behaviour tends to concentrate on what you engage with and, if you use the weakness filters, on what you get wrong. That is good for learning and bad for measurement. If your recent blocks are weighted toward your weak domains, your headline accuracy will read lower than your true, blueprint-representative standing — and if you then drill a weak area to fluency, repeat accuracy on those now-familiar items will read higher than your readiness on fresh ones. Either way, the personalised percentage is not comparable with a mixed, unseen, blueprint-weighted block. Treat the feed as a teaching tool and take your readiness signal somewhere else.
Blueprint audit: attempted distribution versus the ESC curriculum
Do not trust the home-screen average; audit the distribution. Export or tally your attempted-question counts by domain and lay them beside the ESC Core Curriculum chapters. You are looking for two failure modes. First, over-concentration: the feed has poured your time into two or three domains you find engaging or difficult, and whole chapters — pericardial disease, adult congenital heart disease, pulmonary hypertension, cardiac pharmacology — sit under-sampled. Second, thin tails: low-volume but examinable areas the feed rarely surfaces. Because the ESC does not publish exact weightings, aim for representative breadth across every chapter rather than a spurious target count, and force the gaps up manually.
Readiness test: what a credible signal requires
A number only counts as a readiness signal if it was earned under exam-like conditions. Insist on all five: unseen items you have not answered before; timed at EECC pace; mixed across the whole curriculum, not a single-topic drill; no assistance — no notes, no pausing to read around; and a sufficiently large sample, ideally a full 120-question mock rather than a 15-item block whose result is mostly noise. Any figure earned without those five conditions is a study metric, not a readiness metric, and should not be used to decide whether you are ready to sit.
Override rules: force what the feed under-serves
Set standing rules that override the algorithm whenever the material is high-stakes but low-frequency in your feed. Force a block on cardiac imaging and ECG interpretation every week, because image-and-trace items are exactly what a text-heavy feed can under-surface. Force pharmacology and drug-interaction questions, using the SmPC on the electronic medicines compendium to confirm specifics. Force the quantitative items — haemodynamic calculations, valve gradients, risk-score arithmetic — that a knowledge feed tends to skip. And force the small chapters (pericardium, adult congenital, pulmonary hypertension) on a fixed rota so no domain goes dark for a fortnight.
Worked dashboard example: analytics into next week's quotas
Suppose after two weeks your BMJ OnExamination dashboard shows: overall 71% (mostly repeat attempts), first-attempt 58%, strongest in arrhythmias (78% first-attempt, heavily sampled), weakest in valvular disease (49%) and imaging (52%), with adult congenital and pericardial disease barely attempted, and average 105 seconds per item — slower than the ~90-second exam pace. That converts into a quota-driven week, with no pass prediction attached:
- Valvular disease and imaging: 40 fresh items each, untimed first for learning, then a timed re-mix.
- Adult congenital and pericardial disease: 25 items each to close the coverage gap the feed left.
- Arrhythmias: maintenance only — one 20-item timed block, because further drilling buys little.
- One timing drill: a 30-item block with a hard 90-second cap to pull your pace toward exam speed.
- One unseen, mixed, timed 60-item block on iatroX at week's end as the transfer measurement.
The dashboard tells you where to point; it does not tell you whether you will pass, and you should resist letting the pass-likelihood indicator masquerade as that answer.
A seven-day plan for trainees revising around clinical work
For a cardiology trainee fitting revision around service, give BMJ OnExamination one job — high-yield, personalised coverage — and iatroX a separate one — unseen transfer measurement — with no claim about either engine's internals.
- Monday–Thursday (post-shift, 40–50 min): BMJ OnExamination, one ESC chapter per evening, following the feed but manually forcing the day's under-served domain from your override list.
- Friday: a BMJ OnExamination timed mock in the correct format to rehearse three-hour pacing.
- Saturday: iatroX, a fresh, timed, mixed unseen block. Anything strong on BMJ OnExamination but weak here is recognition, not mastery — relearn it from ESC guidance.
- Sunday: light reconciliation and rota planning for next week's forced domains.
Rotate chapters weekly and keep one untouched full mock for the final week.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue if first-attempt accuracy on unseen mixed blocks is rising and your attempted distribution is broadening across ESC chapters.
- Supplement if imaging, ECG, pharmacology or the small chapters stay thin no matter how you filter — add a second bank for those, using the two-Q-bank rule to avoid duplicated items and corrupted percentages.
- Switch the analytics you trust — from percentile and repeat accuracy to first-attempt-on-unseen — the moment you notice the friendly numbers rising while the honest one stalls.
- Stop treating the pass-likelihood indicator as a readiness verdict; it is a usage-derived signal, and the EECC is standard-set independently of it.
The bottom line
BMJ OnExamination genuinely covers the EECC and its personalisation and analytics are useful for learning efficiently around clinical work. What its engine optimises, though, is engagement and coverage of high-yield material, not a blueprint-representative readiness estimate — and its most prominent numbers, repeat accuracy and percentile, are the least diagnostic. Use the dashboard to steer study, force the domains it under-serves, and take your actual readiness signal from unseen, timed, mixed blocks measured elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Is BMJ OnExamination enough for the EECC on its own? It can carry most of the knowledge work, because the EECC is a written MCQ exam and BMJ OnExamination provides a personalised MCQ bank with mock exams in the correct format. The caveat is that its analytics optimise revision efficiency rather than a blueprint-representative readiness estimate, and its per-exam EECC question count is not published (vendor-reported access from £69.99/month, 20 July 2026), so you should still confirm the volume and pair it with unseen mixed mocks before deciding it is sufficient.
Which EECC component does BMJ OnExamination not reproduce well? The EECC has no OSCE or viva — it is entirely a written paper — so the gap is not a component but a category of content: image, ECG and haemodynamic-calculation items that a text-weighted personalisation feed can under-surface. It reproduces the single-best-answer format well; it is the trace-reading and quantitative interpretation you must force manually.
How many BMJ OnExamination questions should I complete per day for the EECC? For a trainee revising around clinical work, 40 to 50 questions an evening, read to completion, is a realistic and sustainable target, with one longer timed mock at the weekend. The daily count matters less than the mix: make sure the week's blocks span every ESC chapter and always include your forced imaging, pharmacology and small-chapter quotas rather than following the feed alone.
When should I stop using BMJ OnExamination and move to mixed mocks? Move your emphasis to full, timed, mixed mocks once your first-attempt accuracy on unseen blocks has plateaued and your dashboard gains are coming mainly from repeat accuracy — typically in the final three to four weeks. You need not stop using the bank to learn, but the readiness decision should rest on unseen, blueprint-mixed 120-question mocks at exam pace, not on the personalised feed.
How should I combine BMJ OnExamination with iatroX without duplicating practice? Assign non-overlapping jobs: BMJ OnExamination for personalised, high-yield teaching and format-accurate mocks, and iatroX purely for fresh, timed, unseen mixed blocks that measure transfer. Never re-answer the same items on both platforms — the second bank's entire value is that it is unseen — which is exactly the discipline the two-Q-bank rule sets out, keeping each percentage interpretable.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 20 July 2026. BMJ OnExamination figures are vendor-reported and were read from onexamination.com on that date; the EECC listing and the £69.99 monthly access price were live, but the per-exam question count was not published, so confirm it on the product page. Disclosure: iatroX operates a question bank that competes with BMJ OnExamination for the EECC knowledge layer; this audit confines iatroX's role to unseen readiness measurement — the job BMJ OnExamination's own analytics do not perform — and makes no claim about the internal workings of the platform's ranking engine. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: ESC / UEMS — European Examination in Core Cardiology and the ESC Core Curriculum for the Cardiologist, 2020 (escardio.org); BMJ OnExamination EECC and features pages (onexamination.com), vendor-reported, 20 July 2026; iatroX — Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score; iatroX — the two-Q-bank rule; iatroX EECC bank via quiz-landing and the comparison hub.