It is easy to be confident that an appropriate body of advice is available to candidates about the content of an examination once you have passed it. Prospectively, the Primary and Final Examinations of the Royal College of Pathologists will appear to most to involve the assimilation of what seems at the time an inexhaustible volume of data, and the recent change in the College examination system has not diminished this concern for the majority of candidates. The guidelines for training for the new Part I examination state that this is the "major hurdle of the MRCPath" and it is clear that it...