Free UKMLA Mock Exam 2026: Every Genuinely Free Paper (and How to Sit One Properly)

You can sit a free UKMLA AKT mock today. The genuinely free options in 2026 are the Medical Schools Council's official practice exam (the most important one, and the one almost nobody mentions), Quesmed's free 100-item paper, aktmla.com's free 100-question mock, Pastest's 100 free questions, UWorld's 25 sample questions, i-Medics' free 3,000-question bank, and MLA Prep's free 50-question diagnostic — ours, and we'll be straight about its limits.

None of them is a free full-length 200-question paper. So the second half of this post is how to stitch a real 200-question rehearsal together at no cost, and — more importantly — how to sit it so the score actually tells you something. A mock you sit badly is worse than no mock, because it gives you a number you'll trust.

Table of contents

1. What a mock has to be to count
2. The official free practice material
3. Every free mock, compared
4. Building a full 200-question rehearsal for free
5. How to sit it so the score means something
6. What your score actually tells you
7. Reviewing the mock — where the marks come from
8. How often to sit one
9. FAQ

1. What a mock has to be to count

Most things sold as "free mocks" are sample questions. That's a different tool for a different job, and confusing the two is why people arrive at exam day surprised by the clock.

A mock has to be:

• Full length, or a known fraction of it. The real thing for UK students is 200 single-best-answer questions, delivered as two papers of 100, each lasting 2 hours — typically on sequential days. The IMG route through PLAB 1 is one paper of 180 SBAs in 3 hours. Ten questions tells you nothing about how you'll be thinking at question 87.
• Timed, with the clock visible and running. Roughly 70 seconds per question on the UK papers, one minute on PLAB 1 — including re-reads, flagging and second-guessing.
• Unbroken. No pausing to look something up. The moment you check a fact mid-mock, you've stopped measuring and started revising. Both are useful; only one gives you a valid score.
• Fresh. Questions you've seen before measure recall of that bank, not clinical reasoning.
• Reviewable. A score with no explanations is a number. Explanations are where the mock actually pays.

If a free offering fails the first three, it's a taster. Use it to judge explanation quality before you buy something — that's a real job — just don't treat the score as a readiness signal.

Quick calibration, five minutes. Ten free AKT-style questions — no account, no card, marked instantly with NICE-referenced explanations. Not a mock. A useful first look at whether the difficulty is where you think it is.

2. The official free practice material

Start here, because it's free, it's official, and it is consistently overlooked in favour of vendor trials.

The Medical Schools Council publishes a practice exam for the MS AKT, along with a student handbook for each year's cycle, in the medical licensing assessment section of medschools.ac.uk under "For students". The Medical Schools Council Assessment Alliance (MSCAA) is the partnership of UK medical schools that maintains the shared bank of SBA questions the AKT is built from — which means their practice material comes from the same authoring tradition as your actual paper. No commercial bank can claim that.

Their site blocks automated tools, so rather than quote specifics we can't verify, go and read it yourself: medschools.ac.uk → For students → Medical Licensing Assessment. Look for the practice exam and the current Student Handbook. If you're a UK student, your own medical school may also run practice assessments on the same platform they use for delivery — ask, because those are free to you and closest of all to the real thing.

Also free and official: the GMC's MLA content map, published as a PDF at gmc-uk.org. Not a mock, but it is the blueprint every paper is built from, and reading the version that applies to your sitting date costs nothing. Note which version you need — the updated map applies to all MLA exams from September 2026 onwards, with papers up to and including August 2026 on the previous version. See what changed and the checklist version.

For IMGs: the GMC publishes information and sample material for PLAB 1 on its own site. Check gmc-uk.org directly rather than relying on third-party reproductions, which go stale.

3. Every free mock, compared

Checked in July 2026. "Free" is doing different work in each row, so read the last column.

Two things worth saying plainly about our own row. Our free mock is a quarter-length paper, not a full one; if you want unlimited full 200-question mocks, that's the paid product and we're not going to pretend otherwise. And if you want zero-account, zero-friction practice right now, our 10-question quiz needs nothing at all.

Also worth knowing: Medpass Academy's UKMLA mock papers require an active paid subscription — their mock isn't free, despite appearing in searches for free mocks. Verify any "free mock" claim before you invest time in signing up.

4. Building a full 200-question rehearsal for free

The honest position: no single provider gives you a free 200-question calibrated paper. You can still rehearse the real thing.

The stack that gets closest:

• Paper 1 (100 questions, 2 hours): aktmla.com's free full mock, or Quesmed's free 100-item paper.
• Paper 2 (100 questions, 2 hours), the next day: the other one of those two.

That's two 100-question papers on sequential days under time — structurally the same shape as the UK AKT. Add our free 50-question diagnostic as a mid-point check a fortnight later, and Pastest's 100 free questions as untimed drilling in between.

Where this falls short, and you should know it: questions from different banks aren't calibrated to a common standard, so a combined percentage across two providers isn't a meaningful single score. Difficulty varies between banks far more than between real papers. Treat each paper as its own data point, compare each to itself over time, and never average them into one number you then trust.

What it's genuinely good for: rehearsing pace, building the stamina to concentrate for two hours, learning your own flagging behaviour, and finding out which specialties collapse under time pressure. Those are the things a mock is actually for, and they transfer perfectly well across banks.

5. How to sit it so the score means something

This is the part that decides whether the mock was worth the morning.

Before:

1. Match the real slot. If your paper is at 9am, sit the mock at 9am. Circadian effects on a two-hour concentration task are real and free to control for.
2. Phone in another room. Not face-down. Another room.
3. One sheet of paper, one pen, water. Nothing else on the desk. No tabs open — especially not NICE CKS.
4. Set a visible timer for the full duration. Don't rely on the platform's; you want the same clock-glancing habit you'll have on the day.
5. Eat what you'd eat beforehand. Sounds trivial. Two hours is long enough for it to matter.

During:

1. Don't look anything up. At all. The single most common way people ruin a mock's diagnostic value.
2. Answer everything. There's no negative marking — a blank is a guaranteed zero, a guess isn't. Leaving questions blank also corrupts your score as a measure.
3. Flag and move. If a question is going past ~90 seconds, pick your best option, flag it, move on. Coming back is cheap; running out of time isn't.
4. Note why you flagged — didn't know it, couldn't decide between two, or misread it. This is the most valuable data the mock produces and it's gone forever if you don't write it down in the moment.
5. Don't stop when it goes badly. Papers feel worse than they score. Finishing a bad mock is itself the rehearsal.

After:

1. Take a real break before reviewing. An hour minimum. Reviewing while demoralised produces bad conclusions.
2. Then review properly — see section 7.

6. What your score actually tells you

It is not a pass prediction, and no platform can make it one. The UKMLA AKT and PLAB 1 are criterion-referenced: the pass mark is set for each paper by a standard-setting process against what a doctor completing F1 should know. For PLAB 1 the GMC uses the Angoff method and includes one standard error of measurement. That means the threshold moves with the difficulty of your specific paper, and third-party figures for "the pass mark" vary widely enough to be useless as a target. We go into it in how the pass mark works.

So don't aim at a threshold. Aim to be clearly clear of it, with margin for a hard paper and a bad morning.

What a mock score is genuinely good for:

• Trend. Your first-attempt accuracy on fresh questions, plotted over weeks. Direction beats absolute value.
• Spread. A 68% average hiding 85% in medicine and 40% in psychiatry is a completely different situation from a flat 68% — and demands completely different revision.
• Pace. Did you finish? With how long to spare? Did accuracy fall off after question 70?
• Calibration. Of the questions you were confident about, how many were right? Overconfidence is a specific, fixable failure mode.

What it isn't good for: comparing yourself to friends on a different bank, or to a readiness percentage generated by a model that has never seen your paper.

7. Reviewing the mock — where the marks come from

The mock is raw material. The review is where the learning happens, and most people do about a fifth of it.

Review all four categories, not just the wrong answers:

1. Wrong, and you knew you didn't know. A knowledge gap. Straightforward: learn it, make a card, revisit it.
2. Wrong, but you were confident. The most valuable category by a distance. You hold a belief that is wrong and feels right — this is what actually costs marks. Find the source and fix it properly.
3. Right, but you guessed. A near-miss you got away with. It will not repeat reliably. Treat as wrong.
4. Right, and you knew it. Skip. Don't re-read explanations for things you know — it feels productive and teaches nothing.

For every question in categories 1–3, you should be able to say why the right answer is right and why each distractor is wrong. If you can't articulate why the wrong ones are wrong, you've learned an answer rather than a discrimination — and the next paper will phrase it differently.

Check management questions against the UK source. NICE, NICE CKS, the BNF. The commonest pattern among candidates who are clinically strong but score below expectation is knowing the medicine and not the NHS pathway — the right drug, the wrong first-line for the UK. That's a source-of-truth problem, not a knowledge problem. See NICE guidelines for the UKMLA.

Turn the flags into a plan. Group your errors by specialty, count them, and let that ordering — not your preferences — decide the next two weeks. Then put them into spaced repetition so they resurface: active recall and spaced repetition.

Budget the time honestly. A proper review of a 100-question paper takes about as long as the paper did. If you don't have four hours this week, sit a 50-question mock and review it fully rather than sitting 200 and reviewing none.

8. How often to sit one

• 12+ weeks out: one now, cold, as a baseline. It will be uncomfortable and that's the point — you're measuring the gap, not your ability. When to start revising sizes the runway from that number.
• Weeks 4–10: one every 10–14 days. Frequent enough to see a trend, spaced enough to change something between attempts.
• Final 3 weeks: one full-length rehearsal, sat in the real format, roughly 10–14 days out. Full review.
• Final week: none. Sitting a mock five days out mostly generates anxiety you can't act on. Consolidate instead — last-minute prep.

Two failure modes to avoid. Mock hoarding — saving papers "until you're ready", which means you never rehearse timing and arrive at the real thing having never done a full one. And mock grinding — sitting one every three days without reviewing, which just burns fresh questions and teaches you to be tired.

9. FAQ

Is there a free full-length 200-question UKMLA mock? Not from a single provider, as of July 2026. The closest free route is two 100-question papers on sequential days from different providers — aktmla.com and Quesmed both offer a free 100-item mock. Start with the Medical Schools Council's official practice material first.

How many questions is the real AKT? For UK students: 200 SBAs, as two papers of 100, each 2 hours, usually on sequential days. For IMGs via PLAB 1: 180 SBAs in a single 3-hour paper. Same content map, same standard — see UKMLA vs PLAB.

What score do I need on a mock to be safe? There's no fixed pass mark to aim at, because it's standard-set per paper. Aim for consistent, comfortable clearance on fresh timed questions with no red specialties left, rather than a specific number. More on scoring.

Do free mocks reflect the real difficulty? Variably. Free samples are often skewed easy — they're marketing, and a demoralising taster doesn't convert. Official Medical Schools Council material is the best guide to real style and difficulty. Judge commercial mocks on whether the explanations cite UK sources.

Can I use a PLAB mock if I'm a UK student, or vice versa? Yes. Since August 2024 both exams are built on the same MLA content map to the same standard. Only the paper structure differs, so rehearse timing in your format.

Should I sit a mock if I haven't finished revising? Yes — that's exactly when a baseline is worth most. A cold mock at week 12 tells you where to point the next twelve weeks. Waiting until you feel ready means you never measure the gap while you can still act on it.

Is a readiness score the same as a mock? No. A readiness score is a model's summary of your activity; a mock is a measurement under exam conditions. Trust the second one.

Do mocks need to be in the same platform I revise in? No, and there's an argument for the opposite — a mock in a bank you haven't drilled guarantees fresh questions, which is what makes the score valid.

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Sit one now rather than planning to. The free 50-question diagnostic is timed, marked instantly, every answer referenced to NICE or the BNF, and gives you a per-specialty breakdown so you know what to revise next. No card. If you'd rather not sign up, ten questions with no account.

The summary: free mocks exist, they're worth using, and the official Medical Schools Council material should be your first stop rather than your last. But the free-ness isn't the important part. A mock only earns its place if you sit it timed, unbroken and honest, and then spend as long reviewing it as you spent sitting it.

Sit one badly and you get a number. Sit one properly and you get a revision plan.

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Further reading

• How to use UKMLA mock exams properly
• How the UKMLA pass mark is set
• Free UKMLA resources worth using in 2026
• When should you start revising for the AKT?
• SBA technique: how to attack the question

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