How many attempts do you get, and what happens if you fail?

Three attempts at each examination within your licensing term. A fourth only if specifically authorised. That is what the Law Society publishes, and it applies to the Barrister and Solicitor examinations separately.

If you are reading this because you have just been unsuccessful, the rest of this post is about what happens next and what to do differently. The first thing to know is that you are not in unusual company, and the second is that the information you have been given is more useful than it looks.

What you get back

Results are pass or fail. The Law Society does not release scores, and it does not publish the passing mark, so you will not be told how close you were.

Candidates who are unsuccessful receive a licensing examination profile: a breakdown of performance by category. Not a score. A shape.

This is the most useful document you will receive in the entire process, and it is routinely misread, usually in one of two directions. Some candidates look at it once, feel bad, and put it away. Others read it as a scorecard and try to reverse-engineer how many marks they were short, which cannot be done from it.

What it is actually good for is telling you where your preparation was thin, in the exam's own terms rather than yours.

How to read it without over-reading it

Three things to hold in mind.

A weak category is not a failed requirement. The pass mark is a single overall score, and candidates are not required to individually pass separate sections or areas of law. A category you did badly in did not fail you on its own. It contributed, along with everything else, to one total.

Small categories are noisy. A category with only a handful of questions in it can look alarming or reassuring for reasons that are mostly luck. Weight the big categories more heavily when you decide where to spend your time, because that is where the recoverable marks actually are.

Look for clusters, not lows. A single weak category is often a bad morning or a run of hard questions. The same weakness showing up across two or three related categories is a real gap, and that is what you want to find.

What to do differently

The most common mistake on a second attempt is doing the same preparation again, more anxiously. More reading, more hours, same method. It usually produces a similar result, because the thing that went wrong was often not how much you knew.

Some things worth examining honestly:

Did you finish the paper? Not reaching the end is a pacing problem, and no amount of extra reading fixes it. If you left questions blank because time ran out, that is the first thing to fix and it is fixable in weeks rather than months. Remember there is no penalty for a wrong answer, so blanks are pure loss.

Was it finding, or knowing? On an open-book paper, a candidate who knows the material but cannot get to it fast enough scores like a candidate who does not know it. These feel identical from the inside and require completely different fixes. If you spent the exam hunting, your index is the problem, not your knowledge.

Did you run out of concentration? A 4.5-hour paper is a stamina event, and for most candidates exam day is the first time they have ever worked at that length without stopping. If your recollection is that the last hour was a blur, that is a training gap, and it is trained by sitting full-length papers rather than by studying in one-hour blocks.

Was your study plan built on percentages? If you allocated time by where your practice percentages were lowest rather than by where the most marks were recoverable, you optimised the wrong number. That is worth re-reading the grading post about.

Did you actually measure, or did you assume? Most candidates are confidently wrong about at least one of their own weakest areas. A profile that surprised you is evidence of that, and it is worth taking seriously rather than explaining away.

The materials change

Questions are derived from the study materials the Law Society prepares for that licensing year, and those materials are updated annually.

This has a practical consequence people miss: your notes and your index from the last sitting are not simply reusable. Some of what you learned is still right, some has moved, and some has changed. Treating last year's index as current is a way of studying confidently in the wrong direction.

It is also why we do not renew indices with repeat access. You keep the edition you originally received, but a candidate writing in a new sitting needs a current one, and we say so plainly rather than letting anyone assume otherwise.

On preparing again

Two practical notes.

If you are using our materials again, you do not pay full price a second time. Repeat access is offered at a reduced rate that reflects the cost of running the platform, and the details are in the FAQ. Preparing again should not mean paying twice.

More usefully: the second attempt is the one where measurement pays for itself most. You already know that studying hard was not sufficient, which means the question is no longer how much work to do but where to put it. That is an answerable question, and answering it specifically, by area of law and by competency and by where your accuracy gave out across the paper, is what our reports are built to do.

The short version

• Three attempts per examination within the licensing term, four only if specifically authorised.
• Results are pass or fail. No score is released, and the pass mark is not published.
• Unsuccessful candidates receive a licensing examination profile: a category breakdown, not a score.
• No single category can fail you, so read the profile for clusters and for big categories, not for lows.
• Ask whether the problem was knowing, finding, pacing, or stamina. They look the same from the inside and need different fixes.
• The Law Society's materials change every year, so last year's index and notes are not safe to reuse unexamined.