Exam Prep · SJT · 2027 Cycle
ICGP SJT 2027: Format, Scoring, Competency Domains and How to Prepare
How to score higher on the test that decides 50% of your GP training ranking
The SJT is the most important and most misunderstood part of the ICGP application. This guide covers everything: what it tests, how it is scored, the six competency domains, the most common mistakes, and a preparation approach that actually works.
Clinical Problem Solving Test
Situational Judgement Test: the single biggest factor in your ranking
Scenario-Based Competency Assessment: online simulated patient stations
The ICGP Situational Judgement Test (SJT) is a 45-scenario, 1-hour online exam that decides 50% of your GP training ranking, more than the interview and CPST combined. For the 2027 intake it is sat on Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 November 2026, alongside the CPST. It does not test clinical knowledge; it tests whether your professional judgement in realistic workplace scenarios matches what an ICGP expert panel considers correct.
Plenty of strong, capable doctors underperform on this test. Not because they don't know how to be good doctors: they just prepare for the wrong thing. They open a clinical textbook when they should be opening a scenario bank. This guide covers what the SJT actually is, how it's scored, what the six competency domains mean in practice, and what preparation that actually moves your score looks like.
The SJT is not an ethics exam. It's not asking whether you know the "right" answer to a moral dilemma. It's a structured read on whether your professional instincts, under pressure, in realistic workplace situations, line up with what the ICGP considers the values and behaviours of an excellent GP trainee. Get that distinction and it changes how you should prepare.
SJT at a Glance: 2027 Intake
- 45 scenarios
- 1 hour duration
- Taken online, proctored at home
- Wed 4 – Thu 5 November 2026, alongside the CPST
- 50% of your final ranking score
- Two question formats: ranking and MCQ
- Partial credit awarded on ranking items
- Benchmarked against expert panel consensus
Source: ICGP 2027 Recruitment Process, Key Dates. Dates may be subject to change; always confirm on icgp.ie.
Each SJT scenario puts you in a situation a hospital doctor will genuinely run into: a difficult colleague, a patient safety concern that's easy to brush past, a communication breakdown, a professional boundary that's suddenly not so clear. Fictional, but not far-fetched. You've probably lived a version of most of them already.
Why does the ICGP bother with this at all? Because it measures something clinical exams simply don't: how you actually behave when the ward is busy and nobody's watching closely. And the evidence backs it up: SJT scores correlate with how people actually perform once they're working. That's the reason it now carries more weight than anything else in GP training selection.
Here's the part that should reassure you: the SJT has a learnable logic. An expert panel builds these scenarios and agrees on what a good response looks like, and that agreement isn't random guesswork dressed up as consensus. It reflects a consistent set of professional values, applied the same way scenario after scenario.
Learn the pattern and your score moves. That's really the whole game.
Two formats show up on the SJT, and they're scored differently, which matters more than most candidates realise going in.
Ranking Items
You get five possible responses to a scenario and rank them from most appropriate (1) to least appropriate (5). Every position has to be filled: no blanks, no ties.
Multiple Choice Items
Eight possible responses, and you pick the three most appropriate. Order doesn't matter here, only whether each individual choice you made is right.
Most candidates lock in on finding the single best response and treat the rest of the ranking as a formality. That habit costs marks. Partial credit runs through the whole ranking, so positions 2 through 5 are worth real fighting for, not just position 1. A candidate who works through all five positions carefully will out-score someone who nails the top answer and guesses the rest.
Every SJT response gets benchmarked against a panel: experienced GPs, GP trainers, and ICGP educators who sit down and agree on what the correct answer looks like for each scenario.
Here's the single most important thing to understand: there is a correct answer.
This isn't asking for your personal ethics or your individual take on a dilemma. It's asking whether your response lines up with what a panel of Irish GP selectors agreed was the most professionally appropriate move. That doesn't mean the answers are arbitrary or designed to trip you up, either. Read enough of these scenarios and a handful of consistent principles start to show through:
- Patient safety always comes first: actions that protect the patient are ranked above actions that protect the doctor or the team
- Escalation is appropriate, not a failure: seeking senior support is a sign of good professional judgement, not weakness
- Communication before confrontation: addressing concerns directly and calmly beats going over someone's head immediately
- Transparency with patients and colleagues: honesty, even when uncomfortable, is consistently ranked higher than avoidance
- Acting within your competence: recognising the limits of your role and knowing when to involve others is rewarded
- Documentation matters, but it is rarely the first or most urgent action in a scenario
Stuck on an unfamiliar scenario? Ask yourself what a GP trainer would be proud to see you do. It's a surprisingly reliable shortcut to the correct response.
Every scenario on the SJT maps back to one or more of six core competency domains. Get familiar with what each one actually means in practice, not just the textbook definition, and your pattern recognition improves fast. Tap any domain to open it.
Integrity, honesty, accountability, self-awareness, and the ability to maintain professional standards under pressure. This domain covers ethical conduct, recognising and managing personal limitations, and behaving professionally in all circumstances.
Listening effectively, explaining clearly, breaking bad news with empathy, checking understanding, and making decisions with patients rather than for them. This domain is about how you interact, not what clinical decision you make.
Applying clinical reasoning appropriately, recognising the limits of your knowledge, seeking help when needed, and ensuring patient safety through sound clinical judgement. This is not a test of clinical facts; it is a test of how you apply and seek knowledge.
Dealing with uncertainty, managing patients with multiple conditions, making patient-centred decisions when there is no clear right answer, and thinking holistically about care. This domain rewards nuanced, non-binary thinking.
Collaborating effectively, supporting colleagues, escalating concerns through appropriate channels, managing conflict professionally, and contributing positively to the team. This domain covers everything that happens in the workplace between colleagues.
Understanding the role of the GP in the broader community, thinking beyond the individual patient to public health, health inequalities, and the social determinants of health. This domain is less frequently tested but important to understand.
Four mistakes come up again and again in candidates who don't score where they should. Spot them in yourself before test day and you're already ahead.
Treating it like an ethics exam
Autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, justice: if you're reaching for that framework, put it down. The SJT isn't rewarding philosophical reasoning. It wants practical professional judgement, the kind a GP trainer would actually recognise.
Answering as the doctor you are, not the doctor you should be
Experienced doctors often rank responses based on how things actually happen on their ward: the workarounds, the shortcuts, the "that's just how it's done here." The SJT isn't interested in that. It's testing aspirational professional behaviour.
Neglecting positions 3, 4, and 5 on ranking items
Find the best answer, then guess the rest: it's the most common shortcut candidates take, and it's expensive. Partial credit runs through the whole ranking, so that guesswork is leaving real marks on the table.
Doing a week of practice and calling it prepared
A single intensive week doesn't build the automatic response instinct this test rewards. Candidates consistently underestimate how coachable the SJT is, and how much of that coaching only shows up after sustained practice, not a cram session.
GP Journey · SJT Practice
Build the instinct.
Practice the logic.
Work through ICGP-style SJT scenarios with full expert explanations and scoring breakdowns. The difference between understanding the test and scoring well on it is practice.
The SJT is coachable, and that's worth sitting with, because a lot of candidates quietly assume professional judgement is something you either have or you don't. It isn't. The scoring logic is learnable, the patterns repeat, and deliberate practice genuinely moves the needle.
The explanation is where the practice actually happens, not the question itself.
Notice the word deliberate. Grinding through 200 scenarios and just checking right-or-wrong won't get you there. The real work is reading the expert explanation on every single question, including the ones you got right, and understanding why that ranking is correct.
Read the six competency domains.Understand what each one means and what it looks like in a scenario. Write one concrete example from your own clinical experience for each domain. This anchors abstract concepts to real situations.
Begin scenario practice at low volume.15–20 scenarios per week, full review of every explanation. Focus on understanding the reasoning pattern, not getting through as many questions as possible. Identify which domains you find instinctively harder.
Increase volume and focus on weak domains.25–35 scenarios per week. For domains where you are consistently off, go back to the competency description and reread it before doing another set of domain-specific scenarios. The instinct builds through repetition with understanding.
Timed practice under exam conditions.Do full 45-question sets within the 1-hour window. Identify where your time pressure affects your ranking quality. Practice the "anchor from both ends" technique on ranking items until it is automatic.
Light review only.Re-read the six competency domains. Do 10–15 scenarios per day. Do not attempt to cram new concepts. The work is already done: what remains is keeping the instinct fresh and your test-day mindset calm.
Trust the instinct you have built.Read each scenario fully before looking at the options. On ranking items, identify your clear top choice first, your clear worst choice last, then fill in the middle. Do not change answers without a strong reason: first instinct is usually right.
The Single Most Useful Habit to Develop
The single most useful habit to develop would be reading the topics within GP Journey and the Good Medical Practice guidebook. Not to relearn clinical medicine, you already know that, but to pick up how the profession talks about itself. The more fluent you get in that language, the more naturally you'll spot what the SJT is actually looking for.
You'll sit the SJT online under live proctoring, a human keeps an eye on your webcam feed the whole way through. Quiet room, reliable internet, a working webcam, and a government-issued photo ID: sort those in advance, not the morning of. The mandatory pre-test technical check happens 3 days before the test window, and it isn't optional: miss it and you're out of the process.
For the 2027 intake, the SJT and CPST fall on two separate days: Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 November 2026. Treat both as full test days. Don't schedule anything for either afternoon, and don't assume day two will feel lighter just because you've already sat one exam. It won't.
Pacing: 45 scenarios in 60 minutes works out to just under 1 minute 20 seconds each. That's genuinely tight: there's no room to re-read a scenario twice or sit deliberating. Practise under timed conditions beforehand and the pace stops feeling like a threat.
If you get stuck, move on. Burning 3 minutes on one hard scenario is a net loss, every time.
Whoever writes these scenarios cares about GP training in Ireland. They're not trying to catch you out: they're trying to find the doctors who'll make good GP trainees, and that means the test actually has a coherent logic running through it. Trust that. The more of it you understand, the less alien the whole thing feels, and the better you score.
Key Numbers: ICGP SJT 2027
- SJT = 50% of your final ranking score
- SBCA (Scenario-Based Competency Assessment) = 40%
- CPST = 10%
- 45 scenarios, sat in 1 hour
- Sat Wed 4 – Thu 5 Nov 2026, alongside the CPST
- 6 ICGP core GP competency domains assessed
Source: ICGP 2027 Recruitment Process, correct as of July 2026. Always confirm current dates on icgp.ie.
Everything in this guide points to the same conclusion: the SJT is learnable, but only if your practice is structured around its actual logic, not generic advice or UK-focused content that doesn't match how the ICGP scores things. That's the specific gap GP Journey is built to close.
The scenario bank is Ireland-specific, built around ICGP selection criteria rather than adapted from UK Foundation Programme material. Every scenario runs in the real exam formats from Chapter 2: ranking items with partial credit, and multiple choice items with independent marking, so the mechanics feel familiar long before test day.
Every question comes with a full expert explanation, not just which answer was correct but the reasoning behind the ranking, tied back to the competency domains from Chapter 4. That's the difference between memorising outcomes and actually building the instinct Chapter 6 talks about.
Analytics track your performance by domain, so you can see exactly where you're weakest and put your remaining weeks toward the areas actually costing you marks, rather than re-practising what you've already got right. SJT, CPST, and interview prep all sit on one synced timeline, and it's HSE TSS eligible, so for most candidates the cost isn't a barrier either.
GP Journey · SJT Practice
You've read the theory.
Now build the instinct.
Start with real ICGP-style scenarios, full expert explanations, and domain-by-domain analytics that show you exactly where to focus.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the ICGP SJT?
The ICGP Situational Judgement Test (SJT) is an online test of 45 scenarios assessing the professional values and behaviours expected of a GP trainee. It counts for 50% of your final ranking score and is sat in November as part of the ICGP GP training application process.
How is the ICGP SJT scored?
The SJT uses two question formats. Ranking items ask you to rank five responses from most to least appropriate; partial credit is awarded for near-correct rankings. Multiple choice items ask you to select three appropriate actions from eight options, and each selection is marked independently. Scores are benchmarked against an expert panel consensus.
What does the ICGP SJT test?
The SJT tests professional values and behaviours, not clinical knowledge. It assesses alignment with the six ICGP core GP competency domains: Professional Values and Behaviours, Communication and Consultation Skills, Clinical Knowledge and Expertise, Managing Medical Complexity, Working with Colleagues and in Teams, and Community Orientation.
How do I prepare for the ICGP SJT?
The most effective preparation is working through ranked scenario banks with expert explanations, understanding the six competency domains, and learning the scoring logic. Consistent daily practice over several months outperforms a last-minute cram. The SJT rewards familiarity with the pattern of reasoning selectors are looking for, not clinical knowledge revision.
How long is the ICGP SJT?
The ICGP SJT consists of 45 scenarios and takes 1 hour. It is sat online under live proctoring.
When is the ICGP SJT in 2026?
For the 2027 GP training intake, the SJT and CPST are sat over two days, Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 November 2026, per the ICGP's published selection timeline. Dates are subject to change; always confirm on icgp.ie.
What percentage of the ICGP score is the SJT?
The SJT counts for 50% of your final ranking score. The interview (Scenario-Based Competency Assessment) counts for 40% and the CPST counts for 10%.
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