This schedule is for family medicine residents and internationally trained physicians preparing for the CCFP Certification Examination who have signed up for The Review Course in Family Medicine and want its lectures and practice papers to translate into marks. It addresses the written SAMP component. The principal limitation is straightforward: The Review Course is a two-day review with streaming lecture videos and a small set of practice papers, not a large adaptive question bank and not a live Simulated Office Oral trainer — so most of your unseen retrieval has to be built around it.
The course has a real strength that shapes the plan below: because it offers streaming video, you can re-watch. That is convenient and dangerous in equal measure. Re-watching a lecture is the single most seductive form of fake studying, and the schedule here is designed to convert those videos into retrieval before the re-watch reflex takes over.
What The Review Course offers for CCFP right now
Treat the figures below as vendor-reported and last checked on 20 July 2026; prices and inclusions change between cohorts, so confirm on thereviewcourse.com before paying.
| Item | What we found (last checked 20 July 2026) |
|---|---|
| Product type | Two-day review course (in-person cohorts plus online streaming lecture videos) |
| Content | The CFPC priority topics (advertised as 105, formerly 99), plus "The Other 105 Topics", and ECG and Skin study guides — vendor-reported |
| Practice material | A free SAMP practice set (advertised as a ~$49.95 value); paid practice papers around $49.99 each, including a "2025 National Practice Hybrid SAMP Examination" reflecting the MCQ and short-menu shift — vendor-reported |
| AI / adaptive features | None advertised |
| Price | Practice papers ~$49.99 each; the study guides ~$64.98 each; the main two-day course fee is not listed on the public pages — verify on thereviewcourse.com |
| CCFP components | Teaching plus SAMP-style practice for the written exam; it is not a live SOO simulator |
Two honest points follow. First, the practice papers are a finite, valuable resource — but they are finite, which means each one is a one-time calibration checkpoint, not a renewable source of daily questions. Second, like any commercial course, The Review Course is a preparation product, not the examining body; the authoritative objectives and samples remain on cfpc.ca.
The CCFP written exam in 2026
The written component is the SAMP: computer-based Short Answer Management Problems, four hours, sat mid-week; the oral component is five 15-minute Simulated Office Orals sat at the weekend. Both are anchored to the CFPC evaluation objectives — priority topics, key features and the scored skill dimensions.
For a course with its own practice papers, the 2026 format change matters directly. From April 2026 the SAMP moves away from write-in answers: the College states that "the 2026 Exam will have up to 25 per cent of the cases in either an MCQ or a short-menu format", rising to all cases in 2027 (verify on cfpc.ca). The Review Course has responded by publishing a "hybrid" practice paper, which is genuinely useful — but a single hybrid paper cannot, on its own, build the recognition fluency the new format demands. It is a calibration instrument; the volume has to come from unseen questions elsewhere. Use the official CFPC sample material as your gold-standard calibration and the course paper as a second checkpoint, then let a bank supply breadth.
Step 1: Pre-test before you press play
Before each streamed lecture, answer three to six unseen questions on that topic first. Failing them primes the teaching to land and, for a busy trainee, tells you whether to watch at full attention or at pace. This is a small habit with an outsized effect, and it directly counters the passivity that streaming video encourages.
Step 2: Watch in bounded segments — and resist the re-watch
Watch in bounded segments — one topic, or 25 to 30 minutes — then stop, close the tab, and produce a blank-page recall before checking anything. The recall should name the key features, the first management step and the red flags. With The Review Course the acute trap is the unlimited streaming: re-watching a lecture feels productive and is not. If a concept did not stick, the fix is a retrieval attempt and a targeted question, not another pass of the video. Reserve re-watching for the rare case where your recall shows you genuinely did not encode the material the first time — and even then, watch only the relevant few minutes.
Step 3: Convert each objective into three prompts
Turn every learning objective into three testable prompts: one discrimination question (what separates this diagnosis from its nearest mimic), one management rule (the single best next step and its threshold) and one "why not the alternative?" prompt (why the plausible second-best option fails here). Under the new MCQ and short-menu SAMP, that "why not the alternative?" habit is worth disproportionate marks, because the distractors are designed to be tempting. Store these prompts as your own retrieval set.
Step 4: Test at 24–48 hours, then space it
Within 24 to 48 hours, test the topic with fresh questions, then again after five to seven days. Here is where The Review Course's own papers earn their place — but only once each. Sit the free SAMP set and the hybrid practice paper under timed conditions as calibration checkpoints, mark them honestly, then retire them: once you have seen a paper, re-sitting it measures memory of that paper, not readiness for the exam. After the checkpoint, unseen volume has to come from a bank. A free Canada-facing bank such as iatroX can be the unseen-measurement layer; the requirement is that the questions are genuinely new to you and sat against the clock.
Step 5: A weekly interleaved block
Once a week, build a timed block that scrambles topic order. Streaming courses are usually organised by system, and studying in that order lets the sequence itself cue your answers. The exam does no such favour. An interleaved weekly block strips out the ordering cue and shows you which topics are secure only because they arrived in a predictable slot.
Step 6: When to exit the videos
Stop watching a topic when your unseen, timed accuracy on it has plateaued between sittings. At that point the video has given you what it can, and re-watching is pure comfort. Completion percentage — how much of the course you have "finished" — is not the outcome; timed exam-format performance is. And your bank percentage is not your exam score, a point worth internalising early (see the linked explainer).
A seven-day plan for a busy trainee
One week around clinical work, using The Review Course for one job — lecture content and objectives — and a bank for adaptive transfer practice. "Adaptive" here means only that you route your own errors back into the schedule; no proprietary-algorithm claims are made.
- Monday: 20 minutes. Pre-test six questions; stream one lecture segment; blank-page recall.
- Tuesday: 30 minutes. Three-prompt sets from Monday's objectives; 10 unseen questions on the same topic.
- Wednesday: 20 minutes. New lecture segment plus recall; log gaps. No re-watching.
- Thursday: 30 minutes. Unseen set on Wednesday's topic; re-test Monday's topic.
- Friday: a single course practice paper as a timed calibration checkpoint (once only), or rest.
- Saturday: 45 to 60 minutes. Interleaved, timed mixed block; flag every high-confidence error.
- Sunday: 20 minutes. Review Saturday's errors; set review dates.
Around three focused hours in a working week — enough to build retrieval, light enough to sustain alongside a rota.
Decision checklist: continue, supplement, switch or stop
- Continue the course-led loop while your recalls and unseen accuracy are improving.
- Supplement with a question bank immediately if your only questions are the course's finite papers; once those are seen, you have no unseen volume, and the 2026 format rewards volume of fresh recognition practice.
- Switch emphasis to oral rehearsal if the SOO is your weak point — streaming lectures cannot rehearse a live encounter, and neither can a bank.
- Stop a topic when timed accuracy has plateaued and remaining errors are careless; redeploy the time.
Decide on measured gaps — coverage, unseen-score trend, error type, weeks to exam — not on how much course content is left to tick off.
Frequently asked questions
Is The Review Course enough for CCFP on its own? No, and it is not designed to be. It is a two-day review with streaming lectures and a small number of practice papers; it delivers structure and content efficiently, but it does not provide the continuous supply of fresh, unseen, timed questions that moves a written score, and it does not rehearse the live SOO. As the teaching and calibration layer within a stack that also includes a question bank and oral practice, it is a strong option; on its own it leaves unseen testing and oral rehearsal uncovered.
Which CCFP component does The Review Course not reproduce well? The Simulated Office Oral. The course can teach consultation content and structure, but the SOO is a timed, interactive, examiner-scored encounter with a standardised patient, and video lectures cannot reproduce that. iatroX shares this limitation openly — it is a written-knowledge and unseen-MCQ layer, not an oral simulator — so plan to rehearse the SOO with a partner, a supervisor or a dedicated practice group rather than expecting any content product to cover it.
How many The Review Course questions should I complete per day for CCFP? The Review Course's questions come as a small number of finite practice papers rather than a daily bank, so the right way to use them is as occasional timed calibration checkpoints — perhaps one every week or two — not as a daily count. Your daily question volume, ideally one 10-question unseen set most days, should come from a dedicated bank so that every item is genuinely new; re-sitting a paper you have already seen measures memory of that paper, not exam readiness.
When should I stop using The Review Course and move to mixed mocks? Shift to full-length, timed, mixed mocks in the final three to four weeks, once your per-topic recall is stable and your weekly interleaved blocks have stopped improving. The lectures are front-loaded value; their return falls once you can retrieve the content unaided, and exam-condition mocks then surface pacing, stamina and cross-topic switching problems that segmented lectures never test.
How should I combine The Review Course with iatroX without duplicating practice? Assign non-overlapping jobs: The Review Course teaches and calibrates (its lectures plus its practice papers used once), and iatroX measures with fresh unseen questions and the weekly mixed block. The two-Q-bank rule linked below keeps this clean — never repeat an item across tools, log each error a single time, and keep one source for teaching and one for measurement. That prevents the inflated accuracy that comes from re-answering questions you have already seen.
Editorial notes and references
Written by Dr Kolawole Tytler, NHS GP and founder of iatroX. Last checked 20 July 2026. Figures attributed to The Review Course in Family Medicine, and to any other vendor named here, are vendor-reported and were current at the last-checked date; verify live inclusions, question counts and prices on the provider's own page before relying on them. Disclosure: iatroX operates a competing question bank and clinical-knowledge platform; this article confines iatroX's role to the unseen-measurement and written-knowledge jobs a two-day course does not claim, and iatroX is not a Simulated Office Oral simulator. Corrections are welcome via the feedback route on iatrox.com.
References: College of Family Physicians of Canada — Certification Examination in Family Medicine, format and 2026 SAMP changes (cfpc.ca); The Review Course in Family Medicine pages (thereviewcourse.com, vendor-reported); iatroX CCFP exam bank (iatrox.com/canada/exam/ca-ccfp); "Your Q-Bank Percentage Is Not Your Exam Score"; the two-Q-bank rule and completion-is-not-coverage framework pillars; the iatroX comparison hub.