Do I still need notes if I am practising stations?

Yes. Practice will show you which knowledge gaps matter, but it is a slow way to close them — reading is much faster for that. Use station practice to find the gaps and your notes to fill them.

Is a PLAB 2 question bank useful?

For the medicine, yes. Question banks are efficient and easy to repeat. They simply cannot assess the parts of PLAB 2 that are marked on how you conduct a consultation, so they should not be your only preparation.

How do I practise interpersonal skills on my own?

You cannot do it silently, which is the honest answer. It needs a person, or a realistic simulated patient, who responds to how you say things and not just to what you say. ZWIP marks the interpersonal domain separately after every station so you can see it move.

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PLAB 2 notes and question banks vs spoken practice

Reading gets the medicine into your head. The exam asks you to get it back out, in a conversation, under time.

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Notes and question banks are the familiar way to prepare, and for good reason — they are how you got through every written exam so far. They are efficient, they are easy to repeat, and they close a genuine knowledge gap faster than anything else.

PLAB 2 is a different shape of exam. The knowledge still has to be there, but you are marked on the consultation you have with the patient in front of you: what you ask, what you notice, what you explain, and how you leave them feeling. That is not something a page can rehearse with you.

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Feature	ZWIP (online AI practice)	Notes and question banks
What it tests	The consultation — what you say, in what order, and how it lands	Recall — whether you can retrieve the fact when asked
Saying it out loud	Every answer spoken to a patient who responds to it	Silent, on the page
Interpersonal skills	Marked as its own domain after every station	Not assessable from a written answer
ICE and safety-netting	You have to actually ask, in the moment, and live with the answer	You can memorise the framework, but not perform it
A patient who interrupts or gets upset	Difficulty you can dial up — anxious, angry, emotional	No equivalent
Closing knowledge gaps	Not what we do — a good bank is faster for this	Excellent: targeted, efficient, and easy to repeat
Feedback	Structured by PLAB 2 domain after every consultation	Right or wrong against an answer key
Cost	A low monthly membership	Low, and often free

The verdict

If your revision is going well and you still feel unready, this is usually why: you have been preparing for a written exam and sitting a spoken one. The gap is not knowledge, it is fluency — and fluency only comes from saying things out loud, badly at first, until they come out cleanly.

Keep your notes. Keep your question bank. Then spend the rest of your preparation talking: realistic patients across all nine station types, exam timing, and structured feedback on each of the three PLAB 2 domains so you can see which one is actually holding you back. Register free and take your first station today.

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