About
The Ottawa Question Bank (OQB) is a crowdsourced, comprehensive assessment tool created by medical students at the University of Ottawa. It was developed to address the growing need for self-assessment tools that can be used by medical students across Canada.
The Ottawa Question Bank is unlike other costly question banks on the market. As a student-led corporation, our goal is to deliver an affordable comprehensive study resource while donating our profits to charity. Proceeds are donated to various Canadian organizations that support medical students, residents, and allied healthcare members.
Several studies over the past decade have demonstrated that question development helps to consolidate information, uncover previously held misconceptions and ultimate retain information more quickly and efficiency. There is therefore as much to gain from purchasing the question bank as there is from contributing to it. Any medical student across Canada can become a the OQB Contributor!
Welcome again to the OQB community and all the best in your academic journey!
All-in-one platform to optimize your studying.
Number of questions
More than 4,200 MCQs and 60 CDMQs covering every uOttawa pre-clerkship lecture, including general medical theory, pathophysiology, physician skills development, case-based decision-making, anatomy, histology, pathology, and radiology.
Regularly-updated and peer-reviewed
New questions are added on an ongoing basis and existing content is updated to reflect current practice guidelines. Moreover, all questions have undergone five rounds of thorough peer-review to ensure accuracy, appropriate difficulty, and relevance to the curriculum.
User-friendly platform
Questions are completed on our updated portal, allowing for an experience that closely mimics virtual MCQ examinations throughout pre-clerkship. Plus, users can track their progress and identify areas for improvement with detailed statistics.
Objective-based learning
All questions are linked to at least one MCC objective, objectives that are shared by all Canadian curricula and tested on the MCCQE Part I.
Answer key
All questions have a detailed answer key which explains why each answer option is correct or incorrect, designed to increase student learning and knowledge retention.
Completely bilingual
The entire question bank has been translated and reviewed; all questions are available both in English and in French.
Our Team
We’re a dynamic group of individuals who are passionate about what we do and dedicated to delivering the best results for our clients.
Dr. Mario Corrado, MD, MSc
Founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer
Born and raised in Montréal, Quebec, I earned a B.Sc. in Microbiology and Immunology and M.Sc. in Physiology from McGill University before completing medical school at the University of Ottawa in 2023. I am currently an internal medicine resident at the University of Toronto, based at Sunnybrook Hospital. Outside of medicine I love hiking and going to the gym. I’m an avid non-fiction reader and hockey enthusiast, and spend as much time as I can with my friends and family, either on long walks or at one of Toronto’s many cafés. I have a strong passion for medical education and teaching, and love working in the team environment of internal medicine. While serving as the VP Academic of the uOttawa’s medical student society, I was surprised with the scarcity of Canadian-focused practice questions, and thus was born the Ottawa Question Bank as an attempt to provide medical students across Canada and abroad with a comprehensive, bilingual study resource.
Rikesh Raichura
Chief Operations Officer
Hi everyone! My name is Rikesh Raichura and I’m a fourth-year medical student at the University of Ottawa. I’ve been involved with the Ottawa Question Bank since my first year of medical school. As a first-year student trying to figure out how to manage the transition from undergrad to pre-clerkship, I found myself relying heavily on the question bank as a primary study resource. I’ve always had a keen interest in education and knowledge translation, and learned best both by working with classmates to teach the material to teach each other and doing as many practice questions as I could get my hands on. With the question bank combining both of these methods, it quickly became my most used resource in pre-clerkship. I initially served as Editor-in-Chief for the first-year material, and for the past two years have been the Lead Editor-in-Chief of the question bank as a whole. I’m so grateful to both the medical student contributors in previous years and all of the current students who use the question bank and who have helped to bring this from a collection of PDFs on a Google drive to the multi-function platform we have today. I can’t wait to see how we continue to advance this tool for medical students across the country.
Isabelle Lefebvre, BHSc
Chief Technology Officer
Having grown up in Ottawa, I earned an Honours Bachelor’s Degree in Health Sciences at uOttawa and am currently in my third year of medical school at the same institution. Being a curious and driven individual has led me to become a motivated self-learner. Given my passion for technology, I have taught myself various programming languages and utilization of open-source software, which enabled me to successfully serve as Vice-President of Information Technology with the Aesculapian Society during the 2022-2023 academic year. During this time, I was approached by Mario to collaborate on the Ottawa Question Bank. I jumped at the opportunity to be involved in this project, as it combines my passion for technology with my interest in medical education. Moreover, having used this resource throughout preclerkship, I was motivated by the prospect of making the Ottawa Question Bank available to students across the country. In my free time, I express my creativity through photography and graphic design. I also value spending time in nature to stay grounded and focused, whether I’m on a bike ride along the Capital Pathway or a canoe-camping trip in a provincial park.