BSB Mock Papers & Past Papers: What’s Officially Available

None of the Bar Standards Board pages we read publishes a past paper for the Criminal Litigation or Civil Litigation centralised assessments. What the BSB does publish is the syllabus for each subject, a Chair’s report for each examination cycle, its paper on how the pass mark is set, and, for the pupillage Professional Ethics exam only, two practice papers in its Surpass exam system with mark schemes, plus an older BPTC sample short-answer paper with a mark scheme. It also provides a centrally set mock exam paper for each litigation exam, but that mock reaches you through your course provider (your AETO), not the BSB website. This page sets out exactly what is official, where to find it, what to make of the files on document-sharing sites, and how to use any mock so it actually raises your score. Independent — not affiliated with the Bar Standards Board. ProSyllabus is an independent study site and nothing here is official. Every exam fact and figure below is quoted or summarised from the BSB’s own documents, read on 27 October 2026.

BSB Bar Qualification Manual Part 3C, Chair’s Report Part 1 and the Professional Ethics exam page, read 27 October 2026.

The Bar Qualification Manual, Part 3C, is the BSB’s own page on the centralised assessments. On mocks it says, in full: “We provide a centrally set mock exam paper for each of the centralised examinations. Mock exams are administered by AETOs and they will advise when the mock exam paper will be available.” In its list of questions you should take to your AETO rather than to the BSB, it includes “Mock examinations and revision materials”. So the one official litigation mock exists, but it is your provider who gives it to you and tells you when.

Part 3C links the current Chair’s reports and says older ones can be requested: “Current reports are available below. Previous Chair’s reports are available on request from our Exams Team.” On 27 October 2026 it linked Part 1 and the April 2026 Part 2. The figures from the three Part 2 reports we saved (August 2025, December 2025 and April 2026) are set out in our pass marks and pass rates guide.

The BSB does not give a reason for the litigation papers in the pages we read. What its documents do show is that questions come from a bank and can be used again. Chair’s Report Part 1 says the examiners compile papers from “the bank of material used for compiling the centralised assessments”, and that “If a question has been used previously, consideration is also given to the statistics regarding the question’s prior performance.” The April 2026 report records the examining team agreeing to correct a typo “before reusing the question”. For the Ethics exam the BSB is explicit: “we do hold a bank of questions and therefore do not publish past papers.”

That has one practical consequence: none of the BSB pages we read publishes a litigation past paper, so nothing on those pages vouches for a document online that calls itself a BSB or BPTC litigation “past paper”. Check where any such file came from before you trust it. The BPTC also had centralised litigation exams, and each of the three Part 2 Chair’s reports we saved says (section 7.1.1): “the final opportunity to take an ‘old style’ BPTC 75 MCQ Civil Litigation paper was the April 2022 sit.” Its format differed from today’s two-paper Civil exam.

Free question sets and videos for the litigation exams can be found online. Some are written by tutors and some by students; none is official, and we do not link them here. Before you rely on one, check three things against the BSB’s own documents:

Uploads on document-sharing sites deserve extra care. The BSB pages we read do not vouch for them, they may follow an earlier syllabus year, and nothing tells you whether the attached answers were checked. We do not link them. If you use one, treat it as a set of topics to look up, not as a guide to the answer.

A mock earns its value only if you sit it the way you will sit the real paper and then work through every mark you dropped. The routine below is ours; the conditions in it are the BSB’s.

In Paper 2 the risk is spending too long in the book. A routine that keeps you moving: first decide which CPR Part the question is about from the facts (for example service, default judgment, relief from sanctions, Part 36); go to that Part’s rule; then check the Practice Direction that supplements it; read the commentary only if the rule does not settle the point. Tab the examinable Parts you find yourself looking up most often in practice, because the BSB allows sticky page markers. Our Civil Litigation guide sets out the permitted materials word for word and the time arithmetic for rolling scenarios.

Below are three single best answer questions in the style of the Criminal Litigation paper, each with the answer and the reasoning. Sit them at the exam’s pace, about two and a half minutes each, before you read the answer.

Practise under exam conditions: the BSB litigation resit bundle covers both Criminal and Civil Litigation, three free questions first.

A Chair’s report is not a past paper, but it is the closest official record of how a paper behaved. For each subject it gives the pass standard, the pass rate, statistical summaries such as how many questions had a low pass rate, and the Board’s decisions on selected questions. In April 2026 there were 9 Criminal Litigation questions with an all-provider pass rate below 40% (14 in December 2025), and 13 of the 90 Civil questions with a passing rate of 40% or below (17 in December 2025). It also reports how questions scored by position: across the first 25 Criminal questions the average pass rate was 68%, across questions 26 to 50 it was 59%, and across 51 to 75 it was 63%, and the report found “no significant evidence suggesting a fall-off in candidate performance during the examination”.

The reports also record when the Board changed a result: for example, the December 2025 Civil pass standard was set at 47 out of 89 after one Paper 1 question was suppressed. The dates and review rules that follow from a report are in our dates, results and resits guide, and the full exam page is the BSB centralised assessments exam page.