How to choose an ORE Part 1 question bank

ORE Part 1 is two computer-based papers of single best answer questions, sat on consecutive days, both of which must be passed in the same sitting. For an exam shaped like that, practising questions is not revision support — it is the revision. Reading a textbook chapter tells you it feels familiar. Answering forty questions on it tells you whether you can retrieve it under time pressure, which is the thing actually being tested.

Which makes the choice of bank consequential, and the market genuinely hard to judge from the outside. Every provider says the same words. Below is what those words should mean, so you can check any bank — this one included — against the same standard.

1. Explanations matter more than the question count

This is the one thing candidates most often get wrong, because question count is the number providers advertise.

A bank of 10,000 questions that only marks you right or wrong teaches you almost nothing. A bank of 3,000 that explains, for every option, why the correct answer is correct and why each distractor is wrong, teaches you the reasoning the examiner is testing. Single best answer questions are built around one discriminating detail; if the explanation does not tell you what that detail was, you have learned a fact rather than a method.

What to check: open a sample question you got right by luck. Does the explanation tell you why the other four were wrong? If it just restates the correct answer, the bank is a testing tool, not a teaching one.

2. How many questions you actually need

Fewer than the marketing suggests, and more than most people do.

The paper draws on the whole undergraduate syllabus, so the number that matters is not the total — it is whether every subject is covered in proportion. Banks written quickly cluster in the easy-to-write areas: pharmacology and anatomy get thousands of questions, while law and ethics, radiation protection, and paediatric dentistry get a handful. Then those thin subjects come up in the exam.

As a working figure: covering the syllabus once, properly, with explanations read rather than skimmed, is several thousand questions. Doing 500 twice is not the same thing.

3. Do the questions look like the real paper?

Single best answer has a specific shape: a clinical stem, five options, one discriminating detail, and distractors that are plausible rather than obviously wrong. Banks that were originally written for a different exam — or written quickly — give themselves away with two-line stems, or four options, or distractors nobody would ever pick.

If the practice questions are easier to read than the real paper, your practice score will be higher than your exam score. That is the worst possible outcome from a bank, because it hides the problem until the day.

4. Can it tell you what you are bad at?

Most candidates spend their first fortnight on the subjects they enjoy. The paper does not care which subjects you enjoy.

A bank should show you performance by subject and topic, measured from the questions you have answered — not a self-rating, and not a single overall percentage. A single score tells you how you are doing. A subject breakdown tells you what to do next, which is the useful part.

What to check: ask whether the breakdown is by subject or just a total. This is the single most common gap in cheaper banks.

5. Is the content current, and does it say so?

UK dental guidance moves. A bank written three years ago will confidently teach you superseded advice on antimicrobial prescribing, radiation protection or medical emergencies, and you will not know which questions are wrong.

Ask which sources the clinical content is checked against, and when. Named sources with a date — the BNF, SDCEP, Delivering Better Oral Health, Resuscitation Council UK, NICE, HTM 01-05, IRR17 — are a different kind of answer from “regularly updated”.

6. Is there a written guide alongside it?

A bank finds your gaps. It does not fill them.

When a question exposes a subject you do not know, you need somewhere to go and learn it. If that somewhere is a textbook you have to buy separately and search through, most candidates simply do not do it — they read the explanation, feel briefly informed, and move on. A bank paired with a written revision guide covering the same syllabus closes that loop.

This is the main structural difference between providers. Some sell a bank. Some sell a course of lectures. Some sell both separately. It is worth knowing which you are buying.

7. Can you try it properly before you pay?

Not a sales page, not a video tour, not ten sample questions written specially for the demo. The real product, for long enough to judge it.

A provider confident in the material will let you into it. A provider who will only show you a marketing page is telling you something. Check whether the trial is the actual bank or a cut-down version written for trials — the difference is usually visible in the explanation quality.

The questions to ask any provider

1. Does every question explain why each wrong option is wrong, or only mark the right one?
2. How many subjects, and how are the questions distributed across them?
3. Is the clinical content checked against named UK sources, and dated?
4. Can I see my performance by subject, or only a total score?
5. Are there timed mocks in the real two-paper format?
6. Is there a written revision guide, or only questions?
7. Can I try the real thing before paying, and for how long?

If a provider cannot answer those plainly, that is itself an answer.

How The Arch Pathway measures up

We wrote that checklist first and built against it, so it is only fair to answer it ourselves.

What we will not tell you is that a question bank guarantees a pass, or that we know what will come up. Nobody honestly can, and no examining body publishes a pass rate for anyone to quote at you.

A note on price

Set the cost of preparation against the cost of the exam. ORE Part 1 is £485, ORE Part 2 is £6,967, and the full ORE route runs to about £7,567 in fees before registration — the breakdown is in what GDC registration costs. Against that, the difference between a good bank and a cheap one is not where your budget is decided. A resit is.

Frequently asked

How many questions should an ORE Part 1 bank have? Enough to cover every syllabus subject in proportion, which in practice means several thousand. The distribution matters more than the total — a large bank clustered in a few easy-to-write subjects leaves real gaps.

Do I need a bank and a revision guide? A bank finds your gaps; it does not fill them. Without somewhere to learn the subject properly, most candidates read the explanation, feel informed, and move on without fixing anything.

Can one bank cover ORE and MFDS Part 1? There is real overlap in the underlying knowledge, and many candidates use one bank for both. The exams differ in emphasis and format, so check the coverage against both syllabuses rather than assuming.

Are free ORE question banks any good? They are useful for sampling question style. They rarely have explained distractors, subject-level analytics or current guidance checks, which are the three things that make a bank teach rather than test.

What is the best ORE Part 1 question bank? There is no single answer, and be wary of anyone who gives you one. Judge on explained wrong answers, proportional subject coverage, current guidance, subject-level analytics and a real trial — then try two and see which teaches you something.