How the NMC OSCE is marked

This page is shorter than most sites make it, because the honest version is short. The NMC publishes less about OSCE marking than candidates would like, and filling that gap with confident guesses is not a service.

What is actually known

• You sit 10 stations, and you may attempt the OSCE up to 3 times within one application.
• The reduced resit fee applies when you resit 7 stations or fewer, which tells you stations are accounted for individually rather than as one combined score.
• Assessors mark against a criteria grid for the station in front of them.
• You are told the outcome after the sitting, and a resit is booked at the same test centre.

Where candidates come unstuck

• Believing a specific pass mark you read online. The NMC does not publish one for the OSCE on its OSCE page, so any figure you have seen came from somewhere other than the NMC.
• Believing a pass rate. Nobody publishing one has the data, and we do not publish one either.
• Assuming a strong station rescues a weak one. Since resits are counted by station, treat every station as needing to stand on its own.

Common questions

What is the pass mark for the NMC OSCE?

The NMC does not publish one on its OSCE page. We would rather tell you that than invent a number. Treat any site quoting an exact pass mark as unreliable on everything else too.

Are OSCE stations passed individually?

The NMC publishes a reduced resit fee for resitting 7 stations or fewer, which means stations are tracked individually. Exactly how they combine into an overall result is not something the NMC sets out on that page, so we do not claim to know.

Does your simulator predict my OSCE result?

No. Our report is a simulated verdict, marked against criteria we wrote, and it carries no weight with the NMC or an employer. Our simulator covers one station of the 10: an assessment-style conversation with a simulated patient, marked against criteria we wrote ourselves. It is not a substitute for practising the clinical skills stations, and its result is a simulated verdict, not a prediction of how an NMC assessor would mark you.