SQE1 Mock Exam Strategy: Sit It to the Official Format

There is no official SQE1 mock exam. The SRA publishes 220 sample questions and says in terms that they “are not designed to be a full mock exam”, and neither the SRA nor Kaplan endorses any provider’s mock. So a mock is something you assemble, and its value depends on how closely it copies the real day: two sessions of 85 questions, 2 hours 33 minutes each, a 60-minute break between them, on screen, closed book. This guide sets out the official format and marking, shows how to build and time a mock to match it, explains what a mock score can and cannot tell you, and maps our own timed practice set against the real paper. The format facts are quoted from the SQE website; the strategy is our advice, and each point says what it rests on. Every SQE and SRA page cited here was read on 14 October 2026, as the live page stood that day. ProSyllabus is an independent study site. We are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) or Kaplan, which delivers the SQE for the SRA; every rule below is quoted or summarised from their published pages, and the SRA decides every application.

SQE website: SQE1 assessment-day page and SQE1 results and marking page, read 14 October 2026.

The same page carries a sentence worth taking seriously when you plan mocks: “Candidates may not have experienced an assessment of this nature and duration before.” It goes on to advise “planning carefully your revision time, having appropriate rest before and in between assessments and bringing sufficient refreshments on the day to maintain your energy levels during breaks”. A full FLK day is 306 minutes of questions (our sum of two sessions) with one break. That length is the thing a mock exists to rehearse.

The marking rule is short, and the SQE website states it twice. The results page: “The correct answer is the best of the stated alternatives and scores 1 mark. There will only be one correct answer. Any other response, including multiple answers, scores 0. There is no negative marking (i.e. you are not deducted marks for incorrectly answered questions).” The marking policy: “Each correctly answered question will receive one mark. No marks will be deducted for incorrectly answered questions. Multiple answers for one question will not be counted.”

Three pieces of strategy follow directly from that rule. They are our advice.

1. Answer every question. A blank scores 0 and a wrong answer scores 0, so a guess can only help. In a mock, count unanswered questions separately: each one is a mark given away by timing, not by law.
2. All questions are worth the same. A 250-word insolvency scenario and a short question on precedent each carry one mark. If a question is eating time, choose your best option and move on; the mark you rescue there costs the same as the one you never reach.
3. Eliminate, then choose. The SRA says each of the five options “is plausible, but only one is correct”. With no penalty, removing two options you know are wrong and choosing among three is always better than leaving the question.

A mock gives you a count of correct answers. The real assessment reports something else, and the gap matters.

What that means for a mock, in our reading. First, no percentage on a mock is a pass or a fail: the real pass mark moves with the difficulty of the paper, and the raw pass mark for a sitting is not something a provider’s mock can know. Anyone quoting a fixed “pass percentage” for SQE1 is quoting something the SRA says does not exist. Second, the published averages give a sense of scale: across real sittings to July 2025 candidates answered a little over half the questions correctly, and at the July 2026 sitting half the candidates passed each paper. Third, a mock is only as hard as its questions. The SRA’s pre-tested samples are the one free source whose difficulty is published, which makes them the best yardstick for the others. Use mock scores to compare yourself with yourself, mock against mock on the same source, and to find weak subjects.

One more caution from the SRA’s own results guidance: subject-level scores rest on “the relatively low number of questions on each area” and should be read cautiously. That applies with more force to a 45-question block.

Our SQE1 FLK1 practice set is not a mock exam and not a full paper: it has 90 questions where a real FLK1 has 170. It is built to be sat as two part-sessions at the real pace. The figures in the right-hand column are read from the set itself.

Used well, the set gives you two timed half-sessions on the right subject mix; it does not give you the stamina of a 153-minute session or an estimate of a real result. Two of the free questions are printed, with their answers, in our guide to free SQE1 practice questions. The ProSyllabus SQE1 FLK1 practice set is independent practice material: original questions written to the SRA's published specification, not SRA sample questions and not live assessment items. It is not written or endorsed by the SRA or Kaplan, it is not a full FLK1 paper, and a count of correct answers on it is not an SQE1 result.

Our advice; adjust it to your own sitting and the material you have.

1. Sit at least one full day before the real one. The SRA warns that candidates may not have met an assessment of this “nature and duration”. Two sessions of 153 minutes with a 50-minute turnaround is a physical task; find out how you fare in the last 40 minutes of the afternoon before the day, not on it.
2. Sit FLK1 and FLK2 mocks on separate days. That is how the real papers fall: in the January 2027 window FLK1 is on 11 to 15 January and FLK2 on 18 to 22 January.
3. Practise the break. Eat and drink in the break, because water is not allowed in the room and a trip out for it runs down your clock.
4. Use checkpoints, not a per-question stopwatch. Some questions take longer, as the SRA says. Halfway through the questions by half time is enough; the tool above gives the three checkpoints for any block.
5. Keep the SRA’s pre-tested samples for late on. They are the only free questions with published difficulty, and once seen they cannot measure you again.
6. Review every question, right or wrong. A right answer reached by a wrong rule will not repeat. Sort errors into law you did not know, law you knew and misapplied, and questions you misread or ran out of time on; only the first is fixed by more reading.
7. Stop mocking on the law before your cut-off. The January 2027 sitting tests the law as at 11 September 2026. Check that a provider’s mock has been updated to the specification that applies from 1 September 2026 and to the 85-question session.
8. Mind the booking dates. For January 2027 the SQE website gives booking closing on 23 November 2026 and results on 9 March 2027.

1. An official SQE1 mock exam. None is published; the sample questions are expressly not one.
2. The raw pass mark for a sitting as a number of correct answers. The July 2026 statistical report gives the passing score as 300 on the scaled score; we did not find the number of correct answers it corresponded to.
3. Any SRA advice on how many mocks to sit, or when. The SRA says how you study is up to you. The plan above is ours.
4. A description of the on-screen tools (for example whether a question can be marked for review). The SQE website links a Pearson VUE demonstration; we did not run it, so we make no claim about it.
5. Total hours for the day. The SQE website says the booking confirmation email gives the length of your day; it publishes no single figure.
6. Any published link between mock scores and real results. We found none from the SRA, so this page offers no conversion.