FCPS Part 1 passing criteria

Results are released as Pass or Fail only. CPSP does not tell you your score, your percentage, or how close you came.

The figure candidates and prep providers quote most often is around 75%, and it is a reasonable planning target. But treat it as a working number rather than a rule — the threshold is set statistically for each sitting, so it is not a fixed line you can look up.

CPSP analyses candidate responses statistically before finalising results. In practice this means:

• Reliability is measured across the paper (Cronbach's alpha), and the standard error of measurement is calculated.
• Bad questions are removed. Items with a poor difficulty index, or a negative discrimination index — where stronger candidates did worse than weaker ones — are excluded from scoring entirely.
• Questions are not worth the same. A harder item that fewer candidates answered correctly carries more weight than an easy one.
• Questions everyone got right, or everyone got wrong, are dropped — they separate nobody, so they contribute nothing.

The practical consequence: your raw count of correct answers is not your score, and two candidates with the same raw count can finish on different sides of the line.

Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so never leave a question blank. On a one-best-of-five item, a blind guess is worth 20% and eliminating even one option makes it 25%. Leaving it empty is worth zero.

This also changes how you should pace yourself: finishing the paper matters more than perfecting the first eighty questions.

Paper I (basic sciences, common to everyone) and Paper II (specialty-oriented) are sat on the same day, 100 one-best-of-five MCQs each. Your result is decided on your performance across both, not on one alone — so a strong Paper II does not rescue a weak Paper I.

Because harder questions carry more weight and poorly discriminating ones are discarded, the exam rewards genuine understanding over memorised keys. Practising against unverified "leaked" banks trains you on questions that may never have counted in the first place.

Two things follow. Cover the whole syllabus rather than betting on high-yield lists — you cannot know in advance which items will be dropped. And check the explanation, not just the key: an answer you cannot justify is one you will lose on a reworded version.