UKMLA Past Papers: Why There Aren't Any, and What to Use Instead
No official AKT or PLAB 1 past papers exist — items are reused between sittings, and publishing a paper would destroy the calibration the pass mark depends on. What the "past paper PDFs" circulating online really are, why the GMC lists seeking them among examples of misconduct, and the free official practice material that does exist.
The short version: there are no UKMLA past papers. Neither the GMC nor the Medical Schools Council releases previous AKT or PLAB 1 papers, and they won't, because the questions are reused across sittings. What circulates as a "UKMLA past paper PDF" is reconstructed from memory — and on the GMC's own list of exam misconduct, seeking that material is a named example.
Official practice material does exist, and it's free. That's the thing worth going after, and it's covered below.
Why past papers don't exist
This isn't secrecy for its own sake. It follows from how the exam is built.
The AKT and PLAB 1 are assembled from a shared bank of single-best-answer items, and items are reused across sittings. That reuse is what makes the exam work: a question that has appeared before has performance data attached to it, which is how the standard-setting panel can judge how a minimally competent candidate should fare on it, and how the pass mark is set for each paper.
Publish a paper and every item in it is burned. You'd lose the calibration data, and you'd have to write hundreds of fresh items per sitting with no evidence about how they behave. No high-stakes licensing exam does this. It's the same reason the MRCP, the MRCGP AKT and the PSA don't release their papers either.
So the absence of past papers is a feature of a properly standard-set exam, not an oversight — and no amount of searching will turn one up, because there isn't one to find.
What the GMC actually says about "recalls"
This is the part most pages skip, and it matters more than the study-efficiency argument.
The GMC's PLAB 1 misconduct guidance lists, among activities associated with the exam, "gaining information about the exam questions in advance of your exam date" and "sharing exam content in any way" — the latter explicitly covering private conversations as well as social media and online forums. Releasing exam content to a third party or commercial organisation is listed separately, as is aiding or abetting any of it.
Read the first one again, because it's the one candidates miss. It doesn't only catch the person who wrote the questions down after their sitting. It catches the person who went looking for them. A "past paper" PDF that is really a recall document puts its reader on that list, not just its author.
There's a second problem, quite apart from the rules: recalled questions are wrong. They're written from memory, hours or days later, by someone under exam stress who was not trying to memorise the stem verbatim. Options get dropped, the vignette loses the detail the answer turned on, and the "correct" answer is whatever the group later agreed it probably was. Learning from that is worse than learning nothing, because you rehearse a wrong answer with confidence attached.
For the PLAB side specifically, there's a further reason the strategy has decayed on its own merits: since PLAB 1 moved onto the MLA content map, the blueprint is far wider and the condition list is explicitly non-exhaustive, so a recalled set covers a much smaller share of the possible paper than it used to. We've written that up separately.
What official material does exist
Free, official, and consistently overlooked in favour of vendor trials:
- The Medical Schools Council publishes a practice exam for the MS AKT, alongside a student handbook for each cycle, in the medical licensing assessment section of medschools.ac.uk. The MSCAA maintains the shared item bank the AKT is built from, so this material comes from the same authoring tradition as your actual paper. Nothing commercial can say that.
- The GMC publishes sample material for PLAB 1 on its own site, plus the MLA content map itself as a PDF. Go to gmc-uk.org directly — third-party reproductions go stale, and the map has a version boundary that matters (see below).
- Free mocks from commercial banks, which are sample papers rather than past papers, and vary a lot in quality.
We compare every genuinely free option — including how to stitch together a full-length rehearsal at no cost — in the free UKMLA mock exam guide. That's the page to read if what you actually wanted from a "past paper" was something to sit.
One thing to check before you use any older material: which content map it was written against. The GMC's updated map applies to MLA and PLAB exams from September 2026; papers up to and including August 2026 sit on the previous version. What changed.
What you actually wanted, and how to get it
Nobody searches for past papers because they want a historical document. They want one of three things, and each has a legitimate route.
"I want to know the format and style." Use the official practice material first, then any bank's free sample. Format familiarity is cheap to acquire and you only need it once.
"I want to know what topics come up." That's the content map, published free by the GMC — and it's better than a past paper, because it's the blueprint every paper is drawn from rather than one sample of it. Our content map checklist turns it into a tracker.
"I want a realistic rehearsal under exam conditions." This is the real need, and a past paper would be a poor way to meet it anyway — you'd have seen the questions. What you need is a full-length, timed paper of questions you have never seen, which is exactly what a mock is for. Sit it in one go, no lookups, then spend longer reviewing it than sitting it. How to use mocks properly, and how to tell whether you're ready.
Our free 50-question mock is unseen, timed, and returns a per-specialty breakdown — no account required. It's shorter than a real paper, deliberately: it's a baseline, not a rehearsal.
Frequently asked questions
Are there official UKMLA past papers? No. Neither the GMC nor the Medical Schools Council releases previous AKT or PLAB 1 papers, because items are reused between sittings and publishing them would destroy the calibration the pass mark depends on.
What about "UKMLA past paper" PDFs I've found online? They're reconstructions from memory, not papers. They're frequently inaccurate, and the GMC lists gaining information about exam questions in advance, and sharing exam content, among examples of misconduct.
Is using recalls actually against the rules? The GMC's misconduct examples cover seeking advance information about questions as well as sharing content — so it isn't only the person who wrote them down who's exposed.
What's the closest thing to a past paper? The Medical Schools Council's official AKT practice exam, and the GMC's published sample material for PLAB 1. Both are free and both come from the exam's own authors.
How do I practise under real conditions then? Full-length timed mocks on questions you haven't seen, sat in one sitting without lookups, reviewed properly afterwards.