SQE practice questions, and 10 you can sit right now

What SQE practice questions actually look like

An SQE1 question puts you in a solicitor's chair. A client walks in with a set of concrete facts, and you are asked which of five statements best describes the position, the advice or the next step. There is no essay, no case citation to recall on demand and no half mark.

That is a different exercise from the law degree most candidates arrive with. You are not being asked whether you know the rule. You are being asked whether you can apply it to a mess of facts, notice which one of them matters, and then choose between two answers that both sound right.

SQE1 is sat as two papers, FLK1 and FLK2, each of 180 questions. If you want the timings and the subject split before you start practising, that is set out in the SQE1 exam format guide.

• A short factual scenario, usually three to six sentences, with a named client and real numbers or dates
• A single question line, most often beginning "Which of the following best describes"
• Five options labelled A to E, each a complete and grammatical statement
• One mark, awarded or not. No partial credit, and nothing deducted for a wrong answer
• Ethics and professional conduct woven into scenarios in any subject rather than flagged as an ethics question

The single best answer skill, explained properly

This is the part almost nobody practises deliberately, and it is where most of the recoverable marks sit.

A well written single best answer question does not offer one correct statement and four absurd ones. It offers one best answer, one that is genuinely defensible, and three that are wrong for identifiable reasons. Candidates who prepare by learning rules keep getting down to two options and then choosing on instinct. Over 360 questions, instinct at that fork is worth a lot of marks in either direction.

The runner up is usually wrong in one of a small number of ways. It states a real rule that belongs to a different statute. It is right on the law but answers a question that was not asked. It reaches the correct outcome by the wrong route. Or it is correct as far as it goes and stops one step short of the point that decides the case.

So the discipline is not "which of these is true". It is "which of these is a complete and accurate answer to the exact question asked, on these exact facts".

• Right rule, wrong statute. An occupiers' liability option quoting the 1957 Act when the claimant is a trespasser and the 1984 Act governs.
• Right law, wrong question. The stem asks what the solicitor must do, and the option describes what the client is entitled to.
• Right answer, wrong reason. The outcome matches, but the reasoning given would fail on slightly different facts, which is how the examiner knows you guessed.
• One condition short. A conduct option that gets informed written consent right but omits the safeguards and the reasonableness test that sit alongside it.
• Right answer to different numbers. A company option applying the substantial property transaction threshold to a transaction that falls well under it.

How to spot the decisive fact

Every SQE1 scenario contains one fact that decides it. The rest is scenery, and some of the scenery is there to pull you towards the runner up.

The decisive fact is nearly always one of a handful of types, which means you can hunt for it systematically rather than hoping it jumps out. Read the stem once for the story. Read it a second time asking only one question: which fact, if I changed it, would change my answer? That fact is the point of the question, and the option that turns on it is almost always the best answer.

In the ten questions below, the decisive facts are things like a price of forty thousand pounds against three million of net assets, a boy coming through a gap in a hoarding rather than a gate, and an earlier failure to surrender that happened in different proceedings. Change any one of them and a different option wins.

• A number. A value against a threshold, a period against a limitation date, a percentage against a statutory test.
• A date. When something was known, when it accrued, when the transaction was entered into rather than proposed.
• A status. Visitor or trespasser, current client or former client, registered proprietor or beneficial owner, sole trustee or two.
• A relationship. A spouse, a connected person, a witness who is also a beneficiary's husband.
• A negative. What the client was never told, what was never disclosed, what nobody inspected. Absences carry as much weight as facts.

Try ten SQE1 sample questions

Ten original questions in the real format: a client scenario, five options and one best answer. They are spread across FLK1 and FLK2, and two of them turn on professional conduct, which is how the real papers handle ethics.

Answer them honestly rather than looking things up, and give yourself about a hundred seconds each if you want the practice to mean anything. Every question tells you why the best answer beats the runner up, not only why it is right.

Free practice

Try 10 SQE1 questions

Single best answer, five options, drawn from both FLK1 and FLK2 with ethics running through them. Pick an answer and you get the full reasoning, including why each other option falls short.

Question 1 of 10

How to practise so it transfers to the exam

Reading questions is not practising. What moves a score is answering under a clock, getting things wrong, and understanding the reason before you meet that pattern again.

Two habits do most of the work. Practise in short daily sets rather than long weekend sessions, because the spacing is what makes the law stick. And treat every question you get wrong as a question to be re-asked at widening intervals until you get it right several times running, rather than as a fact to be reread once.

The third habit is specific to SQE1: log your near misses separately from your outright errors. A question where you were torn between two options and picked the wrong one is telling you something quite different from a question where you had no idea. The first is a discrimination problem and it is fixable quickly. The second is a knowledge gap and it needs the subject reopened.

• Short daily sets beat occasional long ones by a wide margin
• Practise at the real pace from early on, not only in mocks
• Interleave subjects. The real paper does not group them, and switching cost is a skill in itself
• Track your score by subject, not overall, so you know which of the thirteen is dragging
• Keep a separate list of questions where you were down to two options and chose wrong

Why two of the ten are ethics questions

Ethics and professional conduct is examined pervasively on SQE1. There is no ethics paper and no ethics section. Instead a conduct point can turn up inside a property scenario, a litigation scenario or a company scenario, and the question looks exactly like every other question until you read it.

That catches out candidates who set conduct aside as a topic to revise at the end. If you practise conduct only in isolation, you will recognise a conflict question when it is labelled as one and miss it when it arrives dressed as a warehouse sale.

So the sample above puts conduct where the exam puts it. One question is a conflict of interests on a transaction where the commercial terms are already agreed, and one is a collision between confidentiality owed to a former client and disclosure owed to a current one. Neither announces itself.

Knowing when your practice score means something

The SRA sets the pass mark for each sitting rather than publishing a fixed percentage, so no practice score can be converted into a guaranteed pass. Anyone who tells you a precise number is inventing it.

What a practice score can tell you is consistency. A candidate averaging seventy eight per cent with one subject sitting at forty is in worse shape than one averaging seventy two with nothing below sixty five, because both papers sample across their subjects and a single weak area drags the whole result. Look at the spread before you look at the average, and take your last two full timed papers more seriously than any untimed set.