Why this exists.

I was where you are

I'm a medical student in Milan. Two years ago I was trying to get into an English-taught medical programme in Europe, with no real idea what the entrance exam tested or how to prepare for it.

So I did what most people do. I bought courses. Several of them, and none of them were cheap.

What I actually got for the money

Mostly content I already had. Slides restating school biology. Video lectures that moved at half the speed of just reading the chapter. Question banks that gave you a letter at the end and nothing else. You got it wrong, you saw it was C, you moved on, and two weeks later you got the same idea wrong in a different costume.

What none of them taught me was the part that actually decides this exam. That it is negatively marked. That 100 minutes for 60 questions is far tighter than it sounds. That a confident wrong answer costs you nearly two points against a correct one, and that on a five-option question you often gain nothing by guessing at all.

I worked that out on my own, later than I would have liked.

So this is the material I wanted to buy

Every question here is original, written from the published syllabus and checked against a textbook, one at a time. Nothing is reproduced from a past paper. Nothing is bought in from another provider.

And every question explains all five options, not just why the correct one works, but why each of the other four was built to look right. That is slow to write and it is the only part that transfers to the questions you have not seen yet.

The Strategy Guide is the other half: the guessing arithmetic, the pacing, the recurring distractor patterns, the ranking and quotas, the application itself. The things nobody sold me.

What FOCUS is not

Not a course. Not tutoring. Not affiliated with any university or with the Ministry.

It will not teach you biology from scratch. You need a textbook or a teacher for that, and I would rather tell you now than take your money for the wrong thing. And it cannot promise you a seat, because the cut-off is set by how thousands of other candidates perform. Anyone promising otherwise is selling you a feeling.

On the price

It is deliberately less than I paid. Not because it took less work. It took a great deal more. It is because the pricing in this market has more to do with how anxious applicants are than with what the material is worth.

Corrections

If you find an error, send it. It gets checked, and if it is wrong it gets corrected. Material like this only improves through people pointing at the mistakes, and you will get a reply either way.

Contact

See the contact page.