BSB Professional Ethics Exam (12 Jan 2027): Format, Dates, Free Practice

The BSB Professional Ethics exam is 12 short-answer questions in three hours, open book with the BSB Handbook only, sat during pupillage. The next sitting is Tuesday 12 January 2027 at 10am, then 11 May and 27 July 2027. Your first two attempts are free; from the third, the fee is £832 an attempt. The BSB sets and marks it centrally, and you book it yourself on Scheduler, the booking system that Surpass’s supplier EventMap operates, rather than through a course provider as for the litigation exams of the Bar course. It publishes two practice papers in the Surpass system with mark schemes. This page sets out the format, the dates and deadlines, the fees, how answers are graded according to the BSB’s own documents, and how to use the practice papers. 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 Professional Ethics exam page and candidate guide Part 1, read 27 October 2026.

The BSB’s exam page says: “It is an open book exam comprising twelve short answer questions. All parts are equally weighted. Responses are required in the form of narrative prose (short answers).” Each question is a scenario “set within professional practice”, and “the scenarios will cover a range of settings and areas of law (eg criminal practice and civil practice), but no specialist knowledge of these areas is required.” “The exam is three hours long. It is for you to decide how to apportion your time.” That is 15 minutes a question on average (our arithmetic).

How you reach the Handbook differs by venue. At a test centre it is “available online only”, cannot be downloaded, is searched with its own search function and keyboard shortcuts such as copy and paste do not work. Under remote invigilation it is in the browser, can be downloaded as a PDF, and Ctrl+F and copy and paste work. Side-by-side viewing needs a screen of at least 1920x1080 pixels, which every test centre screen meets.

First-time candidates book online in a window that “opens online seven weeks before the exam date … It closes five weeks before the exam.” If you fail and resit at the very next sitting, the candidate guide says the window opens three weeks before the exam and stays open one week, so you have time to receive your result. Tell the BSB about adjustments at least 9 weeks before an exam.

Booking runs through Scheduler. The candidate guide says your pupillage should normally be registered with the BSB before you book; if registration may not be complete while the booking window is open, it asks you to contact the BSB, which can make a booking “contingent on your pupillage being succesfully registered before the date of the exam”. If the BSB has agreed extra time or extra breaks for you, the guide says you “can book your own exam once we have notified you that the adjustment has been approved”. For any other adjustment or arrangement, do not book yourself: the BSB books the exam for you once it has approved it, because a self-booked place is a standard exam with no adjustments. Surpass then uploads the candidate list to Scheduler, which emails you a username and password. The candidate guide says: “Scheduler is maintained and operated by EventMap”, which it describes as Surpass’s supplier. If you cannot attend, the guide says to “cancel at least two weeks prior to the exam” by emailing the BSB.

You must pass before your pupil supervisor can sign off your pupillage and before the BSB can issue a full practising certificate. If you have not passed by the end of pupillage, the BSB says what happens next is up to your pupillage provider.

The BSB’s own answers are the place to start. On passing: “It is expected that competent candidates will have provided at least eight satisfactory answers out of 12, but there will be a review of all candidates on either side of this borderline which will involve a holistic view of the candidate’s entire script.” And a hard rule: “Where a candidate has three or more sub-part answers graded as ‘Unacceptable’ the candidate will be graded ‘Not Competent’, regardless of the grades awarded for answers to other sub-parts. Please note that providing no answer to a question will count as an ‘Unacceptable’ answer.”

The Paper 1 practice mark scheme grades each question’s “application of knowledge” as Good, Satisfactory, Poor or Unacceptable. For each question it lists what a satisfactory answer must show, what a good answer adds, the omissions that make an answer poor, and the statements or omissions that make it unacceptable. In its first question, for example, an unacceptable answer includes “A statement that Moira should ignore what she has seen.” Others are failures to spot a point: “A failure to identify William is vulnerable.” and “A failure to recognise that the Cab Rank Rule applies.” Both mark schemes also give indicative content for an answer “comfortably exceeding ‘satisfactory’”.

On citing rules, the BSB says: “Candidates are expected to accurately identify the Core Duties, rules and other materials which are applicable to the question scenario. While it is helpful to quote rule numbers and other source material, markers are instructed to look for appropriate application of the relevant rules.” So you do not need to memorise rule numbers, but you do need to find the right ones quickly and apply them to the facts.

Would you use a Professional Ethics answer checker? Join the waitlist below. It is not built yet.

The BSB publishes two practice assessments in Surpass, the system the exam itself uses. It says: “the practice assessments are not marked and your responses will not be saved - you will be able to copy and paste them into a Word document in order to evaluate your answers against the mark schemes. There is no limit to the number of attempts for the practice assessment.” It “strongly” recommends trying one, whether you sit at a test centre or online.

A routine for each practice paper (ours): sit it in three hours with the online Handbook; paste your answers into a document; for each question, compare your answer with the mark scheme: for Paper 1, with the points it lists as satisfactory and as unacceptable (the failures to spot a point as well as the statements to avoid); for Paper 2, with its indicative content; give each answer an honest grade; count how many reach Satisfactory or better against the BSB’s benchmark of eight out of 12. Note how long you spent on each question: at 15 minutes each on average, two long answers can leave the last question unanswered, and an empty answer counts as Unacceptable.

The BSB does not set a target: “We do not prescribe to a set passing quota or passing rate.” It uses a competency-based standard-setting method, and “The final passing rate is taken as valid, regardless of where it falls.” On what to expect, the exam page says only: “For the BPTC Ethics exam, the pass rate was typically around 70%. It is not possible to predict the pass rate for the pupillage-stage exam”, noting that every candidate has passed the Bar Training Course and been selected for pupillage, that the exam is open book, and that candidates have more time than in the BPTC exam. The BSB publishes a Chair’s report for each Ethics sitting, the latest for April 2026 at the time of reading, which is where sitting-by-sitting figures appear.

Still to pass Criminal or Civil Litigation before pupillage? The BSB litigation resit bundle covers both, three free questions first. The litigation dates are in our dates and resits guide, and the exam page is the BSB centralised assessments exam page.