This article is adapted from a post in Dr Koshy Jacob's "Building Revise Radiology in Public" series on LinkedIn.

I wrote recently about Core, and about the radiologist it exists for: the trainee with no exam booked, or a date a long way off, who wants to keep their eye sharp across a whole career rather than sprint at a single deadline. Core has no expiry and no date because most of a radiologist's learning happens without one.

Mastery is the opposite proposition, and deliberately so. It is for the radiologist who has a date.

Two entirely different problems

Once a sitting is booked, the nature of the difficulty changes completely. An open library, which is exactly what you want when you are building fluency over years, becomes the wrong tool the moment a clock starts. What a candidate needs then is not more to choose from but less to choose from, arranged in an order somebody has thought about, with somebody else taking responsibility for whether the ground has been covered.

So Mastery is built around a different question. Not what would be good to know, which is endless, but what has actually been examined.

How the material was chosen

The principle is simple to state and was laborious to execute. Every topic that has come up in the exam should appear at least once in the course, as a question or as a case.

That is the whole design. We went back through what the examinations have actually tested across the curriculum, and built a set in which no examined topic is absent. Not every conceivable variation of it, and not every rarity that might theoretically appear, but every topic that has genuinely come up, present at least once, so that a candidate working through the course is not relying on luck to have encountered it.

The point of that single appearance is not that seeing a topic once teaches it to you. It is that a case or question in front of you is a prompt to go and read around it. One well-chosen case on a topic tells you the topic exists, shows you how the examination approaches it, and gives you something concrete to build your reading around. A candidate who has worked through the set and read around what they met can say something few candidates can say honestly: there is no examined topic they have simply never looked at.

This is what I could not get when I was preparing, and it is the gap I have written about before. Working hard and knowing you have covered the ground are different things, and the second one was unavailable at any price.

What Mastery deliberately does not do

Here is the honest limitation, and I would rather state it than have somebody discover it.

Coverage is not the same as weighting. Mastery tells you that a topic has been examined. It does not tell you how often, and a set built for completeness will inevitably give similar prominence to a topic that appears at every sitting and one that has surfaced twice in a decade. Those are not equally important to a candidate with eleven weeks left, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

That weighting is what the live courses are for. In a live course the faculty can lean deliberately on what recurs, spend time where the examination spends time, and answer the question candidates most want answered, which is not what could come up but what usually does. The two are designed to complement each other rather than duplicate: Mastery ensures nothing is missing, the live courses ensure the important things are emphasised. If you can do both, do both. If you can only do one, Mastery is the safer foundation, because an unweighted topic you have seen is recoverable and a topic you have never met is not.

Four courses, not one

Mastery is not a single product. There are four, each built to the same principle but shaped to a different examination: Part 1 Anatomy, Part 1 Physics, FRCR 2A, and FRCR 2B. They are sold separately because candidates sit them separately, and because bundling Anatomy and Physics together, as we used to, forced people to buy preparation they did not currently need.

The 2B course is the largest of them, as you would expect from the examination that most candidates find hardest, and I have written elsewhere about how its short case, long case and viva material was rebuilt.

Where the content comes from, and the order of priority

This is worth being precise about, because it is the question I would ask if I were buying.

Core and Mastery do not share a content bank. They are entirely separate collections, and Mastery is not Core's material rearranged into packets, which would be a poor deal dressed up as organisation.

The order of priority runs the other way from what people assume. When we have material of genuine exam standard, it goes first to the live courses and to Mastery. Only after those have been served does anything become available to Core. The best material we have goes where the stakes are highest, which is the candidate sitting an examination in a few months, and Core is built from what remains after that allocation, which is a great deal and is still checked before it goes anywhere.

I mention this partly because it is true and partly because it is the honest answer to a fair question. Somebody paying for a structured course is entitled to know they are getting something distinct, and they are.

Why there are no fixed cohort dates

We very nearly launched Mastery as fixed cohorts, with defined start and end dates, everyone moving through the material together on a shared timetable. I changed my mind, and the reasoning is worth setting out because it runs against how most exam courses are sold.

Fixed dates create a problem that has nothing to do with teaching. If a cohort began in September and you found us in October, you either wait months for the next one, losing preparation time you cannot spare, or you join knowing you are already behind everybody else. Neither is good for you, and the second is actively harmful, because a candidate who begins their preparation feeling behind carries that feeling into the exam hall. Exam dates arrive later than anyone would like and vary between candidates, and no fixed calendar we invent will ever line up with all of them.

So the model is simpler. Mastery launches on a date, and your access runs to your examination. What matters is not that everybody starts together, it is that everybody arrives ready for their own sitting.

There is a real advantage to joining early, and I want to describe it accurately, because it is a study advantage rather than a commercial one. Sign up early and you have more weeks with the material, more time to read around what you meet, more opportunity for spaced review to do its work. That is worth having. But it does not cost you less to join early or more to join late. We are not running a countdown, and there is no penalty for a candidate whose date came through late or who simply found us in November. The incentive to start early is that starting early genuinely helps you, which seems to me the only honest kind of incentive there is.

What the course does while you are in it

A structured course should do more than hand you a curated pile of material, and this is where most of our building work has gone.

The dashboard shows you where you actually stand. Not how many questions you have answered, which is a number that flatters everybody, but which topics you have covered, which you have retained, and what remains untouched. Coverage and retention are tracked separately because they are different things, and the gap between them is usually where a candidate's real risk sits. If you are the sort of person who revises what feels comfortable, and most of us are, this is the feature that will irritate you most and help you most.

AI marking is part of the course from launch in September. You write or dictate a report, and it comes back assessed against the model answer with a mark, the strengths, and specifically what you failed to say that you should have said. It is not a consultant's judgement, and marking free-text radiology carries a subjectivity I would rather acknowledge than gloss over, but it is available at eleven at night when no consultant is, and knowing what you omitted is most of what a candidate needs.

An AI tutor sits alongside the material, with the context of the case and the model answer, which you can simply ask. Why that diagnosis and not the other one. What would change the management. What is that structure. In my experience the question a learner most needs answered is the one they are embarrassed to ask a colleague twice, and this removes that problem entirely.

Beyond September, the feature I am most interested in is linking related material over time, so that a topic you struggled with returns to you at spaced intervals rather than waiting to be rediscovered. The evidence for spaced retrieval is about as settled as anything in the learning literature, and building it properly into a structured course is what I most want us to get right. Some of this arrives with the launch and some over the months after it. I will say plainly which is which as we go, in the same way I did when writing about Core.

Revise Points run across everything. Study on Core and you accumulate credit that reduces the cost of a Mastery course later, which is the bridge between the two products and, I think, the fairest way to reward people who have been working steadily long before a date appeared.

The one thing we cannot promise

Anatomy deserves a paragraph of its own, and an honest one.

The coverage principle works best where an examination tests a definable body of topics, which is true of physics, of the 2A question papers, and of the reporting components. Anatomy is different. The territory is not a list of examined topics but essentially the whole of human anatomy across every modality, and no course, ours included, can honestly claim to have covered it exhaustively. The Anatomy Mastery course does what can be done well: structured, deliberate work through the territory that matters most. It cannot do what a question bank can do for 2A, and I would rather tell you that now than have you assume otherwise.

More broadly, and I have written about this at length recently, we do not make promises about outcomes. We withdrew our pass guarantee precisely because a first-time pass is not ours to promise and was never a real statement about teaching quality. What we will say is what we have built: a set in which every examined topic appears at least once, so that nothing important has been left to chance. What you do with it remains yours.

Who it is for, plainly

If you have an examination booked, or are about to book one, Mastery is the thing we have built for you. If you have no date, Core is the better tool and will remain so until a date exists, at which point most candidates find they want both.

And if the cost is the obstacle, our preferential pricing applies to the Mastery and live courses for candidates in many countries, and we give scholarships to people who need them. That is not a marketing line. If money is genuinely the thing standing between you and preparing properly, write to us and we will work something out.

Originally shared by Dr Koshy Jacob on LinkedIn. Follow the series there