Home · Resources · The four-week plan

Four principles hold the plan together, and they matter more than the schedule:

• Frequency beats duration. These are attention skills. They consolidate between sessions, not during them.
• Diagnose before you drill. Practising what you are already good at is the most common way to waste three weeks.
• Practise timed, from early on. The rule of each test takes ninety seconds to learn. The pace takes weeks.
• Taper. The last two days should be lighter than the two before them. Nobody ever passed because of what they did on the final evening, and plenty have arrived flat.

Week 1 — find out where you actually are

No technique work this week beyond reading. You are collecting a baseline, and it will be worse than you expect, which is the point.

• Days 1–3. Sit the exam version of each test you will face, one or two a day. Write down every score. Not the practice version — the exam version, with the clock.
• Day 4. Read the guide for each test you scored badly on. Just read.
• Day 5. Re-sit your two worst, applying the method from the guide. Compare.
• Day 6. Start the interview form. Draft six examples badly; they will be rewritten twice more.
• Day 7. Nothing.

By the end of the week you should be able to name your two weakest tests and say why — too slow, too many errors, or falling apart in the second half. Those are three different problems with three different fixes.

Week 2 — build the method

Short sessions, most days, on the weak ones. Twenty to thirty minutes total.

• Daily. Ten minutes on your weakest test, five on your second weakest, then one clean run of something you are good at to finish. Never end a session on a failure — it turns practice into dread.
• Twice this week. A full timed sitting of one weak test, followed by looking at the error breakdown rather than the headline score.
• Once this week. The full thirty-minute vigilance run. Once is enough.
• Once this week. Day mode in practice versions, to see the shape of the day without the fatigue.
• Ongoing. Rewrite the interview examples. Say two of them out loud.

Week 3 — pressure

Everything moves to exam conditions this week, and you start deliberately practising at the wrong moments.

• Match the time of day. If the assessment is at 14:00, at least three sessions this week happen at 14:00. If you have to do it after a shift, do one after a shift.
• One full Day mode sitting, exam versions, in one block. This is the single most valuable session in the entire plan. Do not split it. Expect the last two drills to be noticeably worse than the first two — that is the information.
• The second full vigilance run, ideally late in the day.
• Situational judgement, both formats, against the clock.
• Interview: have someone probe you on all six examples. Record one answer and listen to it.

Week 4 — taper and logistics

• Days 1–3. Half the volume of week three. One drill a day, exam version, rotating. Keep the method fresh; stop chasing improvement.
• Day 4. The last full Day mode sitting, if you want one — four or five days out, no later.
• Days 5–6. Very light. Ten minutes on the test you are most confident at, just to keep the hands in. Re-read your interview form. Sort out travel, ID, clothes and what time you need to leave.
• The evening before. Nothing. Genuinely nothing. Lay out your ID, set two alarms, eat normally, and go to bed at your usual time rather than unusually early.

If you have one week, not four

• Day 1. Exam version of every test, once. Write down the scores.
• Day 2. Read the guides for your two worst. Re-sit both.
• Day 3. Interview form, properly, and say the examples out loud.
• Day 4. The full vigilance run and situational judgement.
• Day 5. One Day mode sitting in exam versions.
• Day 6. Light: one drill, re-read your form.
• Day 7. Rest and logistics.

Things that quietly wreck a plan

• Only practising what you enjoy. Everyone drifts towards the test they are best at. Check your history and see which drill you have not touched in ten days.
• Marathon sessions. Two hours of Group Bourdon teaches you to be tired at Group Bourdon.
• Practising untimed in week three. Comfortable, useless.
• New material in the last two days. It cannot help and it can shake you.
• Sacrificing sleep to revise. On a day built around sustained attention, this is straightforwardly a bad trade.
• Ignoring the interview until the tests are done. It has the longest lead time of anything here, because good examples need to be found, not written. This plan covers the MMI, which shares the assessment day; the DMI with a drivers' manager comes weeks later and gets its own evening of preparation, not a slot in these four weeks.

Next: how to tell whether a low score is a bad sitting or a real weakness — reading your own scores.