Finally passed the PSA on my second attempt — here's what changed my approach
So I failed my first PSA attempt back in March with a 67%, which was gutting because the pass mark is 70%. I knew the pharmacology well enough but kept making stupid errors on the prescription writing stations — wrong dose units, wrong route, stuff like that. Second time around I completely restructured how I practised.
The biggest shift was doing timed prescribing drills every single day for six weeks. Not just reading BNF entries but actually writing out prescriptions by hand and checking them against model answers. I went from making 4-5 errors per 8-question set down to 1-2. I also used the PSA-specific question banks rather than general pharmacology resources, which made a huge difference because the question style is very specific.
Sat the resit last Tuesday and came out with 78%. The adverse drug reaction section was actually quite manageable this time — I'd spent maybe 20% of my revision time on that domain specifically. The drug monitoring questions were the ones that caught me off guard; there were 3 that I genuinely wasn't sure about.
If you're resitting, don't underestimate the data interpretation questions. I think I lost points there the first time without realising it. Happy to answer any specifics about the exam structure if anyone's preparing.
Good timing posting this — I've been debating whether to use question banks or just the official sample papers. Sounds like dedicated question banks are the way to go. Which ones did you use, if you don't mind sharing?
The drug monitoring questions got me too on my first attempt. There were two involving lithium levels where I second-guessed myself and changed my answers, which turned out to be wrong. Trust your instincts more on those ones.
I passed first time with 72% and honestly thought I'd failed walking out. The adverse drug reactions section had some really niche ones — there was one about a respiratory reaction I'd never encountered in clinical practice. The timed drills advice is spot on, that's what my tutor recommended too.
Congrats on passing! I'm sitting mine in about 5 weeks and the prescription writing stations are exactly what I'm most nervous about. Did you find the BNF was enough reference material or did you use anything else alongside it?
Also, 78% is a really solid score for a resit — you should be proud of that.
Honestly the biggest shift for me was treating every wrong answer like a mini case study instead of just clicking past it. When I bombed the first attempt I'd been doing pure recall, memorising that drug X is fine and drug Y isn't, but I never asked myself why. Second time round, every time I got something wrong I forced myself to explain the actual mechanism out loud. Why is this dose dangerous for this patient? What's the interaction doing at the receptor level? It's slower at first but it sticks so much better, and weirdly the prescription writing errors dried up too once I understood the reasoning behind the units and routes.
If you're struggling with the same stuff I'd really push you to drill the interaction stations until you can predict the wrong answers before you even read the options. I leaned hard on this psa drug interactions set and what helped wasn't getting them right, it was sitting with the ones I got wrong and figuring out the pattern. You start seeing the same traps come up again and again. Passed with a 78 second time, and it didn't feel like luck.
Honestly the biggest thing that changed for me was accepting I couldn't cram. I work full time and I've got two kids, so the whole "study for 6 hours straight" advice was useless to me. Instead I did 20 to 30 minutes most mornings before everyone was up, and I'd do a few questions on my phone during my lunch break. It wasn't glamorous but it added up. The prescription stations were my weak point too, exactly like yours, and what fixed it was just drilling them in tiny chunks over and over until the dose units and route stopped being a guessing game.
The other thing I'd say is don't neglect the interactions side. I kept losing marks there without realising, so I worked through this psa drug interactions set a couple of times a week and it genuinely made the patterns click. Little and often, that's the whole secret when you've got no time. You don't need a free weekend, you just need to actually show up for ten minutes a day. Stick with it and you'll get there.