Lead finding first, because it changes everything that follows: MedRevisions does not currently offer an MSRA product. On 19 July 2026 its own site describes a question bank for PLAB 1 and the UKMLA Applied Knowledge Test, not the Multi-Specialty Recruitment Assessment. So if you are preparing for the MSRA, MedRevisions cannot be your analytics engine, however good those analytics are. This audit explains what its adaptive tools actually do, why analytics built for one exam do not transfer to another, and how to read any readiness dashboard so you are not misled — whatever platform you end up using for the MSRA.
What MedRevisions offers right now
Current-state box, vendor-reported and last checked 19 July 2026 (verify the current figures on medrevisions.com):
- Exams covered: PLAB 1 and UKMLA AKT only. No MSRA question bank, no Professional Dilemmas content, no MSRA mocks.
- Question volume: the vendor states 5,400-plus SBAs mapped to the 2026 MLA content map, and 30-plus customisable mocks.
- Adaptive and AI features: an "AI Professor" tutor, an adaptive "Readiness Score", weakness-targeted mocks, AI-generated flashcards and study plans aimed at low-scoring areas.
- Access and price: a free tier of around 70 sample questions, with paid tiers vendor-reported from about US$10.83 per month; confirm the current currency and tiers on the page.
To be fair to the product: those adaptive features are real, and for their target exams they are a reasonable offering. The problem is not quality. It is fit.
Exam anchor: what the MSRA actually is
The MSRA is a computer-based assessment sat at Pearson VUE, 170 minutes long, in two independently timed papers. Professional Dilemmas runs 95 minutes and presents roughly 50 situational-judgement scenarios that are consensus-scored against a panel, using ranking and multiple-best formats — not simple right-or-wrong marking. Clinical Problem Solving runs 75 minutes and presents about 86 single-best-answer and extended-matching items, weighted toward common and primary-care presentations, at a sub-minute pace of roughly 52 seconds per item. Two things follow. First, the MSRA has a substantial non-clinical component that a PLAB/UKMLA bank does not contain at all. Second, its clinical weighting differs from the MLA content map that MedRevisions is built around. Official requirements come from NHS England; third-party mappings are approximations.
The metrics MedRevisions shows — and what each means
Even though these run on PLAB/UKMLA content, the metric definitions are worth understanding, because you will meet the same labels on any adaptive MSRA bank:
- First-attempt accuracy: your score on items the first time you see them. This is the only accuracy figure that approximates unseen performance.
- Repeat accuracy: your score on items you have answered before. It rises with exposure and tells you about memory of specific stems, not readiness.
- Percentile: your rank against other users of that bank. It is cohort-dependent and not an exam score.
- Readiness or predicted score: a modelled estimate. Treat it as a motivational heuristic, never as a pass probability.
- Coverage: the share of the bank's blueprint you have attempted — useful only if the blueprint matches the exam, which for an MSRA candidate here it does not.
- Difficulty and time per item: genuinely useful signals of calibration and pace that transfer across exams.
Selection bias: why adaptive percentages mislead
Adaptive engines deliberately over-sample your weak areas. That is good teaching, but it corrupts your headline percentage in two ways. Your average drops because you are being fed harder, weaker-topic items, so it understates readiness; and because the feed is personalised, your percentage is not comparable with a fixed, mixed, unseen block or with another candidate. This is why an adaptive "Readiness Score" and a timed mixed mock can disagree sharply. For the MSRA the problem compounds: an adaptive score built on the MLA blueprint cannot even in principle reflect MSRA domain weighting or the Professional Dilemmas paper.
Blueprint audit: the fatal mismatch for MSRA
Do the audit properly and the conclusion is unavoidable. Lay the official MSRA domains and the two papers down one axis, and mark what MedRevisions can populate. The Clinical Problem Solving axis is partially served by MLA-mapped SBAs, but the emphasis is calibrated to PLAB/UKMLA, not to the MSRA's primary-care-weighted distribution. The Professional Dilemmas axis is entirely empty: there is no SJT content. A bank that leaves a whole paper — worth 95 of your 170 minutes — unaddressed cannot be audited as an MSRA analytics tool. It can only be reported honestly as out of scope.
Readiness test: the conditions for a credible signal
Wherever you get your MSRA analytics, a readiness signal only counts when five conditions hold at once: the items are unseen, the block is timed at exam pace, the content is mixed across domains rather than single-topic, you use no assistance (no tutor, no notes), and the sample is large enough — at least 80 to 100 CPS items across sittings — to be stable. A rising repeat-accuracy figure on a personalised feed meets none of these. Hold every dashboard to this standard.
Override rules: what an adaptive feed under-serves
Adaptive engines chase your measured weaknesses, so they systematically under-surface material that is rare but examinable: image and data-interpretation items, ethics and prescribing-adjacent scenarios, calculation questions, and low-frequency domains you have not yet failed enough to trigger the feed. On any bank, override the algorithm to force these in deliberately. For the MSRA specifically, the biggest forced addition is the entire Professional Dilemmas paper, which no adaptive clinical feed will ever queue for you.
Worked example: turning a dashboard into next week's quotas
Suppose you are using an MSRA-appropriate bank (not MedRevisions) and the dashboard reads: first-attempt accuracy 62 per cent, repeat accuracy 88 per cent, cardiology and prescribing below your mean, average 70 seconds per CPS item against a 52-second target. Ignore the flattering 88 and the modelled readiness figure. Convert the real signals into quotas: 40 timed cardiology and prescribing items to lift the weak domains; two 20-minute timed sprints to pull pace under 55 seconds; one mixed 45-item unseen mock to re-measure first-attempt accuracy. No pass prediction — just the next week's work, driven by the numbers that transfer.
A seven-day pattern
For a specialty-training applicant, keep tools in their lanes and make no claim to any proprietary algorithm. Days 1 to 5: use your chosen MSRA CPS bank for one job only — targeted retrieval on weak domains, spacing yesterday's misses. Day 3 and Day 6: run a timed, mixed, unseen block in iatroX to measure transfer independently of the bank that taught you. Day 7: sit official Professional Dilemmas sample scenarios and review the rationales. If you are an IMG whose PLAB 1 or UKMLA AKT is still ahead of you, that is where MedRevisions could sit — in a different plan, for a different exam, not inside your MSRA week.
What an MSRA candidate should demand from any analytics
The honest use of this audit is not to shop MedRevisions for a product it does not sell, but to leave with a specification you can hold every MSRA analytics tool to. Demand five things. First, a blueprint that matches the MSRA — primary-care-weighted, not the MLA content map — so ask which blueprint the items are tagged against. Second, a Professional Dilemmas capability, because a bank that scores only clinical SBAs leaves 95 of your 170 exam minutes unmeasured. Third, a first-attempt accuracy figure reported separately from repeat accuracy, so exposure cannot inflate your headline number. Fourth, timed, mixed, unseen blocks you can generate on demand, not only adaptive single-topic feeds. Fifth, pace analytics in seconds per item, benchmarked to the roughly 52-second CPS target. Any platform that cannot give you all five is, for MSRA purposes, an incomplete measurement tool — and that includes an otherwise capable engine pointed at the wrong exam.
Reading a readiness dashboard: three mistakes to stop
Three errors turn a good dashboard into false comfort, whatever bank you use. The first is reading repeat accuracy as readiness: an 85-to-90 per cent figure on items you have already seen measures recognition of specific stems, not ability on novel ones, so only first-attempt, unseen accuracy approximates exam performance. The second is trusting a modelled readiness or predicted score: these are motivational heuristics tuned to a vendor's own cohort and blueprint, and treated as a pass probability they mislead — a readiness figure built on the wrong exam's content, as here, is meaningless for the MSRA. The third is letting the adaptive feed define your coverage: an engine that chases measured weaknesses never volunteers rare-but-examinable material and never queues a Professional Dilemmas scenario at all, so an unaudited "complete" dashboard hides the domains you most need. Read every dashboard as signals to interrogate — first-attempt accuracy, pace and domain coverage against the real blueprint — never as a verdict; see why your Q-bank percentage is not your exam score.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue using MedRevisions only if your current target is PLAB 1 or UKMLA AKT, not the MSRA.
- Supplement is the wrong frame here: you cannot supplement an MSRA plan with a bank that has no MSRA content.
- Switch to an MSRA-specific resource for Clinical Problem Solving and to official material plus a structured approach for Professional Dilemmas.
- Stop any spend on MedRevisions made in the belief it covers the MSRA, and reallocate it to a bank that does.
Frequently asked questions
Is MedRevisions enough for MSRA on its own? No, and not because it is weak — because it does not cover the MSRA at all. On 19 July 2026 MedRevisions offers PLAB 1 and UKMLA AKT question banks only, with no MSRA clinical bank and no Professional Dilemmas content. It therefore cannot be any part, let alone the whole, of an MSRA stack. Verify the current exam list on medrevisions.com before spending.
Which MSRA component does MedRevisions not reproduce well? It reproduces neither MSRA component as such. It has no Professional Dilemmas or situational-judgement product, so that paper is entirely absent, and its clinical SBAs are mapped to the MLA content map for PLAB/UKMLA rather than to the MSRA's primary-care-weighted blueprint, so even the clinical overlap is calibrated to a different exam.
How many MedRevisions questions should I complete per day for MSRA? None, because none of them are MSRA questions. If you are separately sitting PLAB 1 or the UKMLA AKT, follow a plan for that exam. For the MSRA, set your daily CPS quota on an MSRA-specific bank and measure transfer on unseen mixed blocks; MedRevisions has no role in that count.
When should I stop using MedRevisions and move to mixed mocks? For MSRA preparation the question does not arise, because you should not be using MedRevisions for the MSRA in the first place. For a PLAB 1 or UKMLA AKT candidate, the usual rule applies: move to timed mixed mocks once your first-attempt accuracy on unseen items is stable at target for about two weeks.
How should I combine MedRevisions with iatroX without duplicating practice? For the MSRA you would not combine them, because MedRevisions offers no MSRA content to combine. If you are an IMG on the PLAB-to-MSRA pathway, keep the tools in separate lanes and separate exams: any MedRevisions use belongs to your PLAB/UKMLA phase, while iatroX unseen MSRA blocks belong to your MSRA phase, so there is nothing to duplicate.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 19 July 2026. Product facts are vendor-reported and change between diets; verify the current exam list, counts and prices on medrevisions.com. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing MSRA question bank; because MedRevisions does not cover the MSRA, iatroX's role here is confined to unseen MSRA measurement, which MedRevisions does not claim to provide. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: MedRevisions product pages (medrevisions.com, accessed 19 July 2026); NHS England, Multi-Specialty Recruitment Assessment structure and overview (medical.hee.nhs.uk); iatroX, "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score" and "The Two-Q-Bank Rule" (iatrox.com/blog); iatroX MSRA hub and comparison pages (iatrox.com/msra, iatrox.com/compare).