GDC · Overseas Registration Examination
ORE Part 1 Study Plan: How to Revise in Three Weeks
The next sitting is 14–15 October 2026 — 20 days away.
Three weeks is enough — but only if you stop doing what most candidates do, which is re-reading notes from the beginning and running out of time somewhere around oral surgery.
Two things about Part 1 shape everything below: it is two three-hour papers of SBA and EMQ questions, and it is mapped to the GDC’s Preparing for Practice outcomes. That rewards recall across a wide surface rather than depth in a few areas. Three weeks is enough to build wide recall. It is not enough to re-learn dentistry.
Step 1 — Triage before you revise
One hour, today. Write out the twenty topics and mark each one:
Everyone’s instinct is to start on the Cs because they feel most alarming. At three weeks that is the wrong order. Your Bs are where the marks are. A B topic takes an hour to bring back; a C topic takes a week to build from nothing, and there are only three weeks. Work Bs first, hardest Cs never.
If you are short of time, these eight carry the most weight:
Step 2 — Switch from reading to retrieval
Re-reading notes feels productive and is close to useless for an SBA/EMQ exam. It builds recognition — the sense of having seen something before — not recall, which is what the exam tests. The gap between those two is where most failures live. From here, everything should be question-shaped: you see a stem, you commit to an answer before revealing it, you find out immediately whether you were right.
Step 3 — Anki settings for three weeks out
This is the part nobody tells you, and getting it wrong wastes your last fortnight. Anki’s defaults are built for someone studying over months. Change these once, on day one, and the remaining days schedule themselves.
Maximum interval: 7 days
The single most important change. Anki’s defaults will schedule half your cards to reappear after your exam date — you would see them once and never again.
New cards/day: total ÷ 14
Enough to finish your first pass by day 14. If that number looks frightening, cut scope now rather than discovering the problem on day 12.
Learning steps: 15m 1d
Two exposures on the first day, then again the next day.
Leech threshold 4, action: tag only
You do not have three weeks to fight the same eight cards. Tag them, move on, return in the final week.
Reviews before new cards
If you run out of time on a given day, the reviews are worth more than new material.
Step 4 — The three-week shape
Week 1
Cover everything, badly.
One pass over all your A and B topics. You are not trying to master anything — you are making sure nothing is unseen. About 90 minutes a day, split into a morning and an evening sitting.
Week 2
The reviews arrive.
Your day-1 cards come back and the daily load roughly doubles. This is the week people quit, and also the week the method starts paying — recall on week-1 material will be visibly better. Finish new material by about day 14, and add one timed block: forty questions in forty minutes.
Week 3
Consolidate and simulate.
No new material after day 15. Reviews only, plus your tagged leeches, plus two full papers under real conditions — three hours, no phone, no pausing, at the time of day your actual paper falls. Mark them honestly and let the wrong answers set your last few days.
Final 48 hours
Stop.
Reviews only, and nothing at all after the evening before. Little learned in the last day survives to the exam, and being rested outperforms being crammed. Confirm your venue, your ID and your travel. Sleep.
Step 5 — What to do if you fall behind
You probably will. Everyone does.
- Do not restart. Restarting is how three weeks becomes one.
- Cut scope, not frequency. Eight topics drilled daily beats twenty topics twice — daily contact is what makes spaced repetition work at all.
- Drop your weakest C topics deliberately and say so out loud. Choosing to sacrifice a topic is a strategy. Silently running out of time is not.
What a resit actually costs
You have already spent £600 to sit this — £485 for the exam and £115 for the application. Most candidates only count the first number. A resit is another £485 and a four-month wait, and that wait comes out of the five-year window you have to pass Part 2, which now costs £6,967. The full ORE route runs to £7,567. Around one in four candidates fail Part 1 — the GDC’s published pass rates were 73% in April 2025 and 75% in August 2025. Three weeks of disciplined daily revision is cheap against that.
Ready-made decks
Building twenty topics of SBA/EMQ cards yourself takes longer than the three weeks you have. Ours are 3,580 cards mapped to Preparing for Practice, with a full explanation on the back of every card. At three weeks out, High-Yield Core or Full Exam Ready is the right call — Ultimate is the better buy if you are sitting later and have time to cover everything.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by the General Dental Council (GDC). Pass rates are taken from the GDC’s published ORE results analyses. Dates and fees are subject to change — always verify on the official GDC website.