UKMLA flashcards made from your own lectures and notes
Upload your medical school lecture slides, clinical handbooks, textbook chapters, and the notes you took on the ward. Scholarly turns them into flashcards, single-best-answer quizzes, and study guides for AKT revision — every card cited back to the page it came from, so you can check it in one click.
Free to start · No credit card required · Not affiliated with the GMC
From a lecture archive to a deck you can actually sit down with
Scholarly brings no content of its own. It reads the material you give it and builds revision from that.
Upload what you are actually examined on
Lecture slides, the module handbook, the clinical guideline you were told to read, a recording of the teaching session, a photo of your own notes. Scholarly reads the source itself, so nothing has to be retyped.
Generate cards, quizzes, and guides
You get cloze and question-and-answer flashcards for the recallable layer, multiple-choice questions in the single-best-answer shape the AKT uses, and a condensed study guide that collapses a long teaching session into something you can revise in one sitting.
Revise actively, and check the source
Drill the deck, sit the quiz, mark yourself. Any card can be followed back to the slide or page it was generated from — so when something looks wrong, you can see exactly where it came from and correct it. A deck you did not build cannot offer you that.
Built for how the AKT actually asks questions
Recall, judgement, and the traceability that clinical material demands.
Cards from your own teaching
Every card comes from the material your school teaches and examines: your lecture decks, your firm's handbook, the chapter your consultant told you to read. Not a generic bank written for someone else's curriculum.
Cited back to the source
Each card is tagged with the slide or page it was generated from, so verifying a fact takes one click rather than a search. On clinical material, traceability matters more than volume.
Single-best-answer practice
Turn the same upload into multiple-choice questions shaped like the ones the AKT asks — a vignette, a set of observations, and a choice between plausible next steps — then mark yourself and see which conditions you keep missing.
Condensed study guides
Collapse a ninety-slide teaching session into a structured guide organised around presentation, differential, and management, so a topic can be revised in one sitting rather than one evening.
Organised by presentation
Ask for cards grouped around clinical presentations — chest pain, breathlessness, the acutely confused patient — rather than the running order of the slides. That is how a question is framed, and how a patient arrives.
Useful for CPSA prep too
Station-based exams reward recall under pressure: the dose you cannot forget, the red-flag list, the consent points, the order of an examination. Build cards for those from your school's own station guides and clinical-skills material.
What the UKMLA actually is
The Medical Licensing Assessment is run by the General Medical Council and comes in two parts. Which one you are revising for changes what you should be making.
Applied Knowledge Test (AKT)
The AKT is an on-screen, single-best-answer exam set by the GMC and sat in two papers. It tests whether you can apply medical knowledge to a clinical scenario rather than recite it, so a question arrives as a vignette — a patient, an observation set, a result — and asks for the single most appropriate next step. This is the half of the licensing assessment that flashcards, practice questions, and condensed notes are genuinely useful for, because the raw material is knowledge you either have available under time pressure or do not.
Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment (CPSA)
The CPSA is a performance-based assessment of clinical and professional skills, knowledge, and behaviours, delivered by your own medical school — most schools run theirs as an OSCE or a similar station-based exam under a name you already recognise. You cannot revise for it with cards alone, because it is assessed by doing, and no deck substitutes for time with patients and feedback from the people teaching you. What cards can do is carry the recall load, so that on the day your attention is on the person in front of you rather than on trying to remember a number.
Scholarly is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the General Medical Council, and hosts no official MLA content. Requirements and formats change — the GMC's own published guidance is the only authoritative source for what your assessment looks like, and it is worth reading directly.
Who sits the UKMLA
The MLA applies to UK medical students graduating from the 2024/25 academic year onwards: passing it is part of what allows you to join the medical register. It also applies to international medical graduates coming to practise in the UK, for whom the MLA replaced the PLAB route. That means two very different groups revise for the same Applied Knowledge Test from very different starting points — a UK final-year with five years of one school's teaching behind them, and an IMG with a different curriculum, different guidelines, and a different vocabulary for the same conditions. Both end up hunting for the same thing: a way to convert the material they already have into questions they can be tested on. Scholarly does not care which of the two you are, because it brings no content of its own — it works from whatever is in front of you.
Why a shared deck ages badly against a content map
The GMC publishes an MLA content map — a defined list of clinical presentations and the conditions that sit underneath them — and the AKT is blueprinted against it. The GMC has also published an updated content map, which applies to MLA exams and assessments taken from September 2026, so a deck a stranger shared two years ago may be mapped to a version of the syllabus that no longer exists. That is the structural problem with any inherited bank of cards: it ages, and you cannot see where it aged, because you do not have the source it was written from. Building from your school's current teaching and the current content map you can read yourself does not have that failure mode. When a card is wrong, you can see the source; when the source is out of date, you can replace it.
Revise presentations, not chapters
Undergraduate teaching is organised by system: a fortnight of cardiology, then a fortnight of respiratory. The AKT is not organised that way at all. A question hands you a patient who is breathless and asks what you would do next, and the answer might be cardiac, respiratory, haematological, or anxiety — the question does not tell you which module it came from. A student who has revised strictly by chapter knows a great many facts filed under the wrong index. When you upload a lecture pack to Scholarly you can ask for the cards to be organised around presentations rather than the running order of the slides, which forces the differential to be part of the card rather than an afterthought. It is a small reframing, and it maps far better onto how the questions are written — and onto how patients actually turn up.
Cards are for recall. Questions are for judgement.
Flashcards are extremely good at one thing: making a fact retrievable under time pressure. They are poor at the thing the AKT mostly tests, which is choosing between four plausible next steps for a patient who is seventy-two and already on three drugs. So use both, and use them for different jobs. Turn a teaching session into cards for the recallable layer — the mechanism, the dose, the red flag, the first-line agent — and turn the same session into single-best-answer questions for the judgement layer. Then mark yourself and look hard at what you got wrong. The pattern in your wrong answers is far more informative than the number of cards you have reviewed, and it is the only reliable signal telling you which source to go back to.
The pile of material you already have is inert
Every UK medical student ends up with the same pile: a lecture archive nobody has opened since the module ended, a clinical handbook, a set of guidelines, half-legible notes from the ward, and a textbook chapter you were told to read and did not. It is not a shortage of material that stops you revising — it is that the material is inert. Passive re-reading feels productive and largely is not; testing yourself on material, and spacing that testing out across weeks rather than cramming it into one evening, is among the most consistently supported findings in learning research. The whole point of turning your own sources into cards, questions, and a condensed guide is to make that pile testable, so a revision session has something to do in it beyond highlighting.
What Scholarly is not
Worth knowing before you sign up, not after.
Not a UKMLA question bank
Scholarly has no bank of UKMLA questions, official or otherwise, and ships no licensed exam content. Everything you see is generated from material you upload. If what you want is a curated question bank, buy a question bank — several good ones exist, and they solve a different problem to this one.
Not affiliated with the GMC
Scholarly is an independent study tool with no affiliation to, endorsement from, or connection with the General Medical Council. Nothing here is official MLA content, and the GMC's own guidance is the authoritative source on what the assessment covers and how it runs.
Not a replacement for clinical teaching
The CPSA is assessed by doing, and no revision material replaces time with patients and feedback from your teachers. AI-generated cards can also be wrong, which is precisely why every card is cited: check it against the source before you learn it.
Keep exploring
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AI practice exam generator
Sit a mock paper written from your own material, then mark yourself against it.
Medical terminology flashcards
Drill the vocabulary layer that everything else sits on top of.
Revision notes generator
Condense a long teaching session into a structured set of revision notes.
USMLE flashcards
The same approach for medical students sitting Step 1 and Step 2 in the US.
Scholarly vs Studocu
Why your own slides beat a stranger's summary of a course like yours.
UKMLA flashcards — frequently asked questions
What is the UKMLA?
The UK Medical Licensing Assessment is run by the General Medical Council and comes in two parts: the Applied Knowledge Test, an on-screen single-best-answer exam set by the GMC and sat in two papers, and the Clinical and Professional Skills Assessment, a performance-based assessment of clinical and professional skills delivered by medical schools. It applies to UK medical students graduating from the 2024/25 academic year onwards, and to international medical graduates, for whom it replaced the PLAB route. The GMC's own guidance is the authoritative source on format and requirements, and it is worth checking directly rather than relying on any third party.
Does Scholarly have a UKMLA question bank?
No. Scholarly holds no bank of UKMLA questions and no licensed or official exam content. It generates flashcards, quizzes, and study guides from material you upload — your lectures, your notes, your handbook, your textbook chapter. If you already own a question bank, use it for question practice, and use Scholarly to turn the topics you keep getting wrong into cards built from your own teaching material.
What should I upload for AKT revision?
The material your school actually teaches and examines: lecture slides, the module handbook, your ward notes, recordings of teaching sessions, and the chapters you were told to read. A current source you trust produces better cards than a large, stale one. You can upload several sources into one workspace and generate a deck that spans all of them, which is usually a better match for a presentation-based exam than one deck per lecture.
Can it help with the CPSA or OSCEs?
Indirectly, and it is worth being honest about the limit. The CPSA is assessed by performance, so cards cannot practise it for you — only patients, simulated or real, and feedback can do that. What cards do well is carry the recall load: doses, red flags, contraindications, the sequence of an examination, the points you must cover to take consent. Build those from your school's own station guides and clinical-skills material so that on the day, the recall is automatic and your attention is on the patient.
Are AI-generated flashcards accurate enough for medicine?
They are generated from the source you give them and cited back to the page or slide they came from, which is exactly the point: any card can be checked in one click. They are not infallible, and clinical material is precisely where you should check rather than trust. Treat a generated deck as a first draft of your revision, written by something that has read your lecture — and then edit it. The editing is itself a study session, and it is the part where you notice what you did not understand.
Is the material I upload private?
Your lecture slides and your notes are not published to other students, and your workspace is not a library that other people browse. Scholarly is not a note-sharing site. Nothing you upload is published to other students, added to a public library, or made searchable by anyone else — your workspace is yours, and that is the core difference from note-sharing platforms. For the full detail of how Scholarly handles uploaded content, including data use and retention, read our privacy policy.
How is this different from a shared notes or flashcard site?
A shared library gives you somebody else's summary of somebody else's course. That can be useful, but it is generic by construction: it does not know which conditions your school emphasises, which teaching sessions you missed, or which topics you personally keep getting wrong, and you cannot check it against a source you do not have. Scholarly starts from your material and nothing else, cites every card back to it, and publishes none of it.
Is Scholarly free?
There is a free tier you can start on without a card — enough to upload a source and generate your first deck, quiz, or study guide from it. Paid plans raise the limits on how much you can upload and how much you can generate.
Turn your lecture archive into AKT revision
Upload the slides, the handbook, and the chapter you never got round to reading. Get cards, questions, and a study guide built from them — cited, editable, and private to you.
Free to start · No credit card required · Not affiliated with the GMC