Sitting mocks

The most repeated advice from candidates who passed: sit full papers, in real conditions, on questions you have not seen.

Real conditions means real conditions

The value of a mock is almost entirely in its fidelity. A four-hour attempt at a seven-hour paper, with your phone on the desk and a question you read last week, tells you very little.

• Full duration, with the correct timetable for your paper. Seven hours with a thirty-minute lunch for the Chartered and Incorporated papers; three and a half hours with no break for the supplementary.
• No phone, no internet. Bring the folder you intend to bring and nothing else.
• A question you have not read. Choose several in advance and do not look at them until you sit down.
• Your own lunch, eaten in the break, with your script turned over.
• Handwritten, on paper, with the pens you will use.

Candidates who did this consistently report the same outcome: the real day ran like clockwork, and they had time in hand at the end.

How many

Enough that the shape of the day is automatic. Several candidates quoted in the Institution's guidance describe sitting around four. The first tells you how badly you manage time; the second tells you whether you fixed it; the rest build the habit.

If four full papers is not realistic, sit section mocks in between — a timed 2c, a timed set of drawings, a timed method statement — and at least two full ones.

What to do with each attempt

Mark it against the mark allocation, not against your feelings about it.

1. 01Where did the time actually go? Compare to the timetable you planned. The gap is your real problem.
2. 02Which section did you leave unfinished? That is the section to practise in isolation.
3. 03Did you attempt every part? If not, the lesson is about stopping on time, not about knowing more.
4. 04Would a stranger follow your calculations? Legibility is a marking criterion.
5. 05Did stability get stated explicitly? If it was implicit, fix that habit now — it is the automatic-fail condition.

Then rewrite your timetable. The Institution's guidance is that timetables should be personalised and reviewed after mocks, which is only useful if you actually revise it each time.

Writing your own practice briefs

Practice questions should be original. Queensferry reproduces nothing from the Institution's examination archive — not its question papers, its examiners' reports, its worked answers or its candidate scripts — and nothing on this site is derived from them.

Writing your own is genuinely good preparation: take a building or a bridge you know, strip it to a brief with a site constraint, a ground condition and a functional requirement, and hand it to a colleague to sit. Producing a brief that admits two distinct viable schemes teaches you exactly what section 1a is asking for.