Free UKMLA Anki Deck: 300 Cards, Weighted by the Content Map

The short version: the deck above is 300 cards covering all 38 specialty groupings in the UKMLA content map, with each one's share of the cards set by its published weighting — so Heart & Vasculature gets 22 cards and Breast gets 4, because that is roughly how the exam is built. It is a plain CSV that Anki imports in one click, with no add-ons and no field mapping.

The rest of this page is what's actually in it, how to import it, how to use it without drowning in reviews — and, honestly, what a flashcard deck cannot do for you.

What's in the deck

Most free UKMLA decks are somebody's own revision, shared. That means they're shaped by the specialties that person found hard, the placements they happened to be on, and the year they sat. Useful, but lopsided in ways you can't see from the outside.

This one is built the other way round: start from the blueprint, then fill it.

The GMC content map attaches a published weighting to each of its clinical areas — Heart & Vasculature is 10–14% of the paper, five areas sit at 6–8%, and a tail sits at 1–2%. The deck allocates its 300 cards in those proportions.

That last row is worth a word. The map's presentation groups — chest pain, breathlessness, the rest — cut across the clinical areas rather than sitting alongside them, so they carry no separate percentage. They still get a floor of three cards each, because a deck that silently omitted "General & Emergency presentations" would be quietly misleading.

Within each area, the cards are spread across topics rather than taken from the first few — so you get one or two cards from each of an area's topics instead of twelve cards on one condition.

The cards themselves are the same style as the ones in our app: a fact you should be able to state cold. A definition, a first-line investigation, a first-line management step, a threshold, a classic trap. Not paragraphs.

"Hb threshold diagnosing anaemia in adult males" → "Hb <130 g/L (WHO). Non-pregnant females: <120 g/L; pregnant: <110 g/L"

How to import it

Enter your email in the box at the top of this page and the CSV downloads immediately — no account, and the email is a copy of the same file plus these instructions.

Then:

1. Open Anki on desktop. (The importer lives on desktop; once imported, the cards sync to mobile like any other deck.)
2. File → Import, choose the CSV.
3. Click Import.

That's it. The file carries its own settings in a small header block, which Anki has read since version 2.1.54 — the field separator, the note type, the destination deck, and the per-specialty tags are all filled in before you see the screen. You should not have to touch a dropdown.

The cards land in a deck called UKMLA — MLA Prep free deck, tagged by specialty as UKMLA::Heart_and_Vasculature, UKMLA::Mental_Health and so on. Those tags are the useful part: you can build a filtered deck of one specialty the week you're revising it, without splitting the deck up.

Two things that occasionally go wrong. If you're running an Anki older than 2.1.54, the headers are ignored and you'll get the old import screen — set the separator to comma, and map the first column to Front and the second to Back. And if your Anki is not in English, the note type named Basic won't exist under that name; pick your equivalent two-field type in the import screen.

How to actually use it

A deck you import and then abandon is worse than no deck, because it cost you the twenty minutes and gave you the feeling of having done something. Three settings decide whether that happens.

Cap new cards per day. The default is 20. At 300 cards that's a fortnight to see them all, and your daily review load stays sane. If your exam is close, 30–40 is defensible. Setting it to 300 and doing the lot on day one is how people end up with a 400-review backlog on day four and quit.

Turn on FSRS if it isn't already. Anki's newer scheduler has been built in since version 23.10 (October 2023), but whether it's switched on depends on how old your install is — check deck options. It schedules noticeably better than the legacy algorithm, and it costs nothing to enable.

Review daily, including the days you don't want to. Spaced repetition is a schedule, not a technique. Miss four days and the algorithm's estimate of what you know is stale; miss ten and you're doing a cold re-read with extra steps.

One more, less obvious: when a card is wrong, notice why. "I've never met this fact" and "I knew this and blanked" are different failures. The first is a gap — go and read the topic. The second is a retrieval problem, which is exactly what the deck fixes on its own.

What this deck won't do

It would be easy to leave that section out. Here it is anyway, because the mismatch between what flashcards train and what the AKT asks is the single most common way people revise hard and still underperform.

300 cards is not coverage. The content map runs to hundreds of conditions and presentations, and the GMC's updated map — which applies to MLA and PLAB exams sitting from September 2026 — is explicitly non-exhaustive, meaning the published list is a guide rather than a boundary. A 300-card deck is a spine. Treat it as the facts you should never lose marks on, not as the syllabus.

Recall is not the exam. The AKT gives you a clinical vignette and five plausible options, and asks you to choose between them under time pressure. A flashcard asks you to produce a fact with no distractors and no clock. Both matter, and they're not substitutes: you can know every fact in this deck and still pick the wrong management option because two of the five options were defensible and you'd never had to separate them before. The way to find out which one you are is to sit a timed paper and look at the questions you got wrong despite knowing the content.

Cards go stale. Guidelines change; a card doesn't know that. This deck is a snapshot, dated below. If you're using it near an exam, sanity-check anything that looks like a threshold or a first-line drug against current NICE or BNF guidance — which is a habit worth having anyway.

Free deck, community deck, or built-in flashcards?

The honest read: if you already live in Anki, a deck is the right shape for you and this one gives you a vetted, blueprint-weighted starting point instead of a stranger's revision. If you don't already use Anki, importing a deck is not the moment to learn it — the setup tax is real, and we say so in our comparison of UKMLA flashcard options.

And if what you actually want is flashcards that arrive already written, already scheduled, and tied to the questions you're getting wrong, that's what the app does — the 300 cards here are a slice of the same 11,118.

Frequently asked questions

Is the deck really free? Yes. You give an email address, the file downloads immediately, and a copy arrives in your inbox. There's no account, no card, and you can unsubscribe from the first email.

Will it work on AnkiDroid or AnkiMobile? Import it on desktop, then sync. The mobile apps review the cards fine; the CSV importer is a desktop feature. Anki is free on desktop and Android; the iOS app is a one-off paid purchase, which is Anki's own pricing, not ours.

Is 300 cards enough for the UKMLA? No, and nothing that size would be. It's a high-yield spine covering every specialty in blueprint proportions — the facts you shouldn't be losing marks on. Coverage comes from working through the content map and a question bank.

Can I edit or share the cards? Edit them freely — once they're in your collection they're yours to change, and reformatting a card in your own words is good for you. Please don't republish the deck as your own.

How is this different from the deck comparison post? That post reviews the options — community decks, mega decks, built-in flashcards — and helps you choose. This page hands you a deck. If you're still deciding, start there.

Further reading

• Best UKMLA flashcards and Anki decks compared
• Active recall and spaced repetition: the evidence, applied to the AKT
• The GMC content map, explained
• What changes in the September 2026 content map
• How many practice questions you actually need
• Free UKMLA resources: what's genuinely free in 2026