General Surgery ST3 scores your application out of 55 marks across seven questions, from the published 2026 self-assessment. Two of them are bell curves: 13 to 36 months in general surgery and 36 to 70 appendicectomies are the sweet spots, and going past them loses you marks. Full MRCS is an eligibility requirement rather than a scored domain. Every claim needs the Shortlisting Evidence Checklist countersigned by your educational supervisor, uploaded to the Qpercom portal.
What the sections are
- Months in General Surgery post-foundation — 8 marks. Full marks looks like: "13 to 36 months."
- Appendicectomies completed — 10 marks. Full marks looks like: "36 to 70."
- Closed loop audit — 8 marks, assessor-judged rather than banded. Your single best closed loop audit, and it must have been presented.
- Complementary specialty experience — 4 marks. Full marks looks like: "At least 4 months each in two or more of these specialties."
- Publications, two best — 10 marks, assessor-judged rather than banded. Five marks per publication.
- Academic presentations, two best — 10 marks, assessor-judged rather than banded. Five marks per presentation.
- Stand-alone degree — 5 marks. Full marks looks like: "PhD."
What costs people marks
- The experience and appendicectomy questions are bell curves: more is not better. 13 to 36 months in general surgery and 36 to 70 appendicectomies score full marks, and going past either range costs you.
- The closed loop audit must evidence involvement in BOTH cycles or you score zero and cannot proceed to interview — and generic audits such as trust VTE or antibiotic compliance are no longer accepted.
- Publications must be PubMed indexed with a PMID and an impact factor. Pay-to-publish journals such as Cureus score zero.
- For appendicectomies, cases where you only assisted do not count, and gaps in the logbook drop you to 1 mark.
- Presentations at departmental, hospital or regional level do not count, and duplicate presentations of the same data score once.
Check the official document
This page is a plain-English summary of the framework as Docrr models it — it is not the framework itself. Before you rely on any number here, check the official source: HEE higher surgery general surgery appendices.
Scoring frameworks change annually, sometimes substantially, and the version that matters is the one attached to the round you are applying in. Last checked against the source on 2026-08-17.