I'm sitting Part 2B in October and feeling reasonably confident on the rapid reporting but the viva is where I'm most anxious. I passed Part 2A on my second attempt with 67% last year, so I know I can handle written material, but the viva format is just different – you can't go back and change an answer and the examiners' follow-up questions are unpredictable. I've got 8 weeks and I want to use them well.
My current routine is about 2 hours of rapid reporting daily and one mock viva session per week with a registrar colleague. The mocks have been helpful but I'm not sure I'm being pushed hard enough since my colleague is also preparing for Part 2B. I'm trying to find a consultant willing to do a proper mock with realistic follow-up questions, but most are too busy to commit to multiple sessions.
The systems I'm least confident on are hepatobiliary and musculoskeletal – MSK especially since my current post is chest-heavy and I don't see a lot of MSK day to day. I know the classic findings but I'd struggle if an examiner pushed me into rarer differentials or asked me to justify management in detail. I've been using Grainger and Teaching Files mainly.
Is 8 weeks realistically enough to cover weak areas without sacrificing the strong ones? I'm wondering if I should accept being “good enough” in MSK and focus on shoring up hepatobiliary instead since that shows up more reliably in the rapid reporting component too.
On the MSK vs hepatobiliary question – I'd cover both but lean toward hepatobiliary given how frequently it appears. For MSK, know the pattern of the big entities well enough to reach the right differential even if you can't go three levels deep. The examiners want to see your clinical reasoning process is sound, not that you've memorized every rare variant.
The rapid reporting time pressure is real and consistent daily practice is the only thing that helps. I did 30 images timed at 30 seconds each every single day for my final 6 weeks. My accuracy at the end was probably 78% vs 61% on a comparable image set at the start, so the volume does move the needle.
I found a consultant through my deanery who agreed to two mock viva sessions at 4 weeks and 2 weeks out. The first session was humbling – I knew the answers but couldn't deliver them under pressure. The second was dramatically better just from having been through it once.
My actual examiners were quite warm compared to what I'd feared going in.
8 weeks is enough if you're structured. The candidates who struggle in the viva aren't usually the ones who don't know the material – it's the ones who freeze when pushed and can't articulate their reasoning out loud. Speaking your thought process daily, even to yourself, makes a bigger difference than another hour of reading.
Just wanted to drop a quick update since I've been following this thread. I did a mock viva with my consultant last week and scored what she estimated would be a solid pass, which honestly surprised me because I felt like I was rambling half the time. Turns out talking through your reasoning out loud matters more than having the perfect answer.
I'm sitting in November rather than October so I've got a bit more runway. The thing that's helped most isn't more reading, it's doing short timed talks to literally anyone who'll listen, even if they don't know radiology. You stop relying on notes pretty quickly when you have to actually explain something to another person.
Honestly I nearly withdrew my application about 6 weeks out because the viva felt so unpredictable. What helped me was stopping the passive reading and doing timed hot-seat sessions with a registrar colleague three times a week -- she'd throw a chest film at me and I had to talk through it out loud, no pausing to gather thoughts. It felt brutal at first but that's exactly what forces you to organise your thinking under pressure rather than just knowing the material silently.
The thing nobody really tells you is that the examiners aren't trying to catch you out, they want to pass you. I kept reminding myself of that when I froze on an abdominal case in one of my mock sessions. If you've got 8 weeks you've got enough time, just make sure most of it is active practice not revision. The rapid reporting confidence you already have will carry over more than you think once you get used to speaking your findings aloud.
Honestly I nearly withdrew about three weeks out because the viva just felt like this unpredictable beast I couldn't tame. What helped me was treating each session like a real viva rather than a revision session — I'd have a colleague throw a case at me cold and I had to talk through it out loud, no notes, no pausing to think silently. It felt awful at first but that discomfort is kind of the point. For neuro specifically I drilled a lot of the pattern recognition stuff, including working through frcr/questions/frcr neuroradiology 3 which caught a few gaps I didn't know I had.
The viva really is a different skill to the written and I think the mistake most people make is treating their last 8 weeks like an extension of Part 2A prep. You've already got the knowledge. What you're building now is composure under pressure and a systematic way of presenting findings so you sound confident even when you're not. Don't underestimate how much that matters to the examiners.