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British psychiatry trainees like me almost universally rely on a paid resource and question bank called SPMM for our written exams. It's very expensive for the entry level package, doubly so if you want their paid mocks, triply if you want a statistics crash course.
Why? Because the nominal syllabus is... everything. Or at least so large that it's completely impractical for even the best trainee to read the official reading list/syllabus and then understand whats relevant to the test. We have to rely on SPMM (or lesser known alternatives) to make things manageable.
You would think that the dedicated teaching we get during our training itself, or the Royal College's free online material would help right? Oh no, that's unwarranted optimism. Like it or not, you need SPMM.
SPMM claims to have unusual, perhaps questionably legal levels of insight into the actual questions that come on the exam (they probably ask the people who just gave it to jot down as much as they can from memory). That's alongside their doctors hand-crafting what they imagine are representative questions to pad things out. What kind of doctors? From what I can tell, ones just a few years senior to me. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since they would have given the same exams recently.
I presume the same people choose the correct answer for the questions they wrote, and then the answer stem too. But once that's set in stone, the grading is automated. I can't even flag things to the attention of a human within the company. They don't care.
Are they non-practicing? I hope not. They're probably just cash-strapped and asked to shit out a ton of output for not very much money. QC seems inadequate. Even their teaching material is riddled with errors. And this is the best money can buy!
I passed my earlier exam with a different version of the paid material, and I can tell you that the overall quality of things was grossly superior. This time, they're borderline scamming me. By the time I realized, it's too late to simply give up and read the primary sources, or even to switch to a competitor. Literally every other resident I know is in the same boat, and it's rapidly sinking.
The good news is that the actual exam, or at least the last one I gave, was mostly sane. Mostly. There was a question about the mechanism of action of a new antidepressant, where the real answer was "nobody knows", but I had to choose something else anyway. Praying that's the case here, but bad study material and bad mocks are driving me nuts.
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