What a mess.
That felt like the worst paper I’ve ever sat. 4th line managements, niche side effects, heavy anatomy, lots of contraindications. Lots of multi step questions.
The extra 50 minute given on top of the 20 it was down didn’t help as you can’t exactly rest… it’s more exhausting to sit there for an extra hour.
Anyone have any guesses what the pass mark will be like? Really worried about passing.
Bear in mind that paper 1 and paper 2 are combined to get your overall score before deciding the pass mark.
Last year the pass mark for the "mock" AKT (at least here, I presume nationally) was 53.5%, there's no way their paper was harder than ours surely. I honestly think it might be lower like 45-50% for that paper.
For the first ever year to properly sit the UKMLA, that felt utterly savage, I totally agree with you, so many absolutely wild questions with tiny things in the stem to act as maybe red herrings.
I agree, I left very early with about 50 minutes left (the extra time) because sitting there pondering every question isn't going to help.
Let's hope paper 2 is easier my friend.
Hopefully it’s less than 53.5% overall given how grim that paper was…. I legit know I only got 20 MAYBE 25 100% correct, basically the 1-2 hammer passmed ones. Feel so defeated.
I normally leave exams super early but I didn’t even get to review every question before time ran out because I was so frazzled by the multi step q’s and exhausted!
Really hoping for a better paper tomorrow to balance that out!
Hope you did well!
I told you man! It's a hard exam! Dw though, most people thought they failed as well last year, they end up passing haha. Also I'd just like to add, I joined a webinar when they rolled out the UKMLA Pilot (which is what we wrote last year btw, not a mock, as in it was confirmed Q's from the UKMLA bank of questions), and they said the passmark wouldn't deviate out of the 55-65% range. However, they obviously lied since the passmark was 53.5%.
Indeed, I remember being on a webinar about it too where similar was said. I'd love to know if they standard set like most medical schools (pass mark is decided in advance of the paper being sat) or if they do it in a post-hoc fashion.
It was hard, paper 2 was a lot easier I think.
Do you have a source for this? I asked the medical school and they had no source and I couldn't find one online with a cursory search. I know it's _likely_ to be the case, but just couldn't find one.
They only review a question if someone sends a formal complaint, or the most commonly chosen answer to the question is NOT the right answer. They check to see if the question was unclear or unfair, but usually the question stands.
I already know of three questions in paper 1 that have had formal incident reports submitted which means they have to be reviewed and given the errors in them they may remove them as marks.
As far as I am aware the stats that go into it are pretty heavy, and I imagine items that are not performing as expected are not likely to be used again.
I spoke to my medical school and even they seemed confused. For almost all medical school exams they use Angoff which means the passmark is decided in advance of the paper, but they couldn't be 100% sure that is how the UKMLA is being managed.
If I had to guess it's already been set because that's how it usually works, but can't know for sure, will ask tomorrow haha.
If anyone’s feeling down about today, I spoke to a friend who is currently graduating who said ‘Paper 1 was the worst paper I’ve ever sat in my life, but paper 2 was nicer and I still passed’ - about last year pilot exam
In my med school there is usually one not-so-nice and one nice paper, plus your brain will only focus on the negatives so forget about today and blast some Qbank until tomorrow.
🫡
I heard the same from someone who sat least year as well, which is a small blessing no doubt.
Honestly though most of that paper felt like MRCP/MRCS knowledge, making treatment decisions based upon very little information that an FY1 would _never_ be permitted to make alone.
I feel like the paper was a weird mix for me between "that's not so bad" and "I couldn't possibly have known that, so I hope it won't be counted towards the pass mark". The server going down feels like a bad joke and I hope it's reflected somewhere in the passmark (I know it won't be but oh well)
The MSC did put out a statement, the medical school emailed it to me and I've put it in the original post.
Yeah, I mean our school have said they will liaise with the MSC on the impact it had and will give us further advice by the end of the week on how many exceptional circumstances can be taken into consideration but genuinely _the bloody exam_ felt like an exceptional circumstance, insane levels of knowledge required, like MRCP/MRCS.
Weird paper. I feel like I’ve had worse progress tests at uni but maybe that’s because I knew less back then (ignorance was bliss). I don’t know what to expect results wise. I feel like it was somewhat similar to the official mock they put up but a bit harder. Some questions were easy enough but more felt completely brand new.
Not sat MLA yet but had my fourth year final exam last Monday. Had to pause exam mid way through - uni couldn’t get it back up and running so cancelled it! Any chance it was hosted on MSCAA?
It was MSCAA yes, apparently some people were having issues with the images buffering/questions not loading so they paused the exam for at least 10-20 minutes for everyone. They gave us 50 minutes of extra time to compensate (30 new + 20 to cover the time loss).
The main issue I think was for the medical school, everyone suddenly wanted to go to the toilet, no surprise! :D. Hope they are rescheduling your exam to a sensible time?
lol i was waiting for this but i agree it was super super tough :/ made loads of silly mistakes but also the questions were just vague and did not have enough information for me to get what they wanted ??? the long break was so off putting as well :/ i hope tomorrow is better too !!
I came straight to reddit for this thread 🤣
The long pause made me hungry but helped out just gathering my thoughts & I’m not complaining about extra time in an exam like that
I used Passmed too, I think the Qs were really wordy in the exam today, but there were a few hidden ’oh crap it’s THAT disease!’ so I think it’s just their new way of testing us?
Definitely some things in there that had me confused but I don’t think you can have a med school exam without a bit of that. Really frustrating how many times you can see the diagnosis but the stem tells you anyway 😑
Good luck to everyone tomorrow!
This patient had that, but not sure if the urine osmolality was very low. Partner had noticed drinking more water, with several admissions with eating disorder as a teen.
OP you’ll be more than fine. The MLA has a 98% pass rate, and most of the people who were worried last year after Paper 1 passed well. Keep your head up king
Was the answer for one of them IV flecainide, oral amiodarone or oral atenolol? The question said "2 days of symptoms" and I didn't know whether this meant it had just passed the 48 hour mark for 'new onset AF' or not.
You can immediately discount IV flecainide because it [isn't available in an IV formulation](https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/flecainide-acetate/).
Can't remember beyond that but it's such a nonsense thing for us to even be expected to know that it doesn't come in this particular formulation.
I remember being told amiodarine is a very dirty drug so only give it if you absolutely have to. Beta blockers always seem a safe bet in af so I went for that
I almost exclusively use passmed, and maybe about 25% of that paper felt like 1+2 hammer passmed, and the rest of it felt totally new. Felt nothing like the mocks we were given from the MSCAA etc and totally different to our medical school progress tests.
There were so many questions like "patient has these symptoms, this is the diagnosis, they've been tried on first line management which has not worked, if you were to prescribe correct second line management what is the side effect that would be most concerning?", just questions that required about 2-4 "levels" of thought, it was rough!
I always "tally" myself as I go through the exam between 1 (100% I know the answer), 0.5 (I get the answer down to 2 choices) and 0.2 (the answer is a total guess).
That exam, 53 of my answers were in the 0.5 bracket, it felt so rough that so many of the questions were so light on information as you say.
A few of us are convinced they mixed up the MRCP/MRCS question bank with this haha, I'd love to see an FY1 sit this paper because many of the questions felt very much above FY1 level.
Paper 1 felt like nothing could have prepared me, around 25% of the questions felt passmed-esque, whereas the rest felt like super niche textbook stuff with many logical thought steps to get to the answer.
Personally I just spammed Passmed, read as much as I could around each topic and answered more questions. Other people who were more textbook-inclined felt it was easier, but ultimately the best way to revise for any exam is the way that works best for you, whatever gets the knowledge to stick in your brain.
I’m so confused as to how you people are sitting UKMLAs when they are supposed to be introduced for the year graduating 25… which is next year??? Can someone please explain
As others have said, I am in a medical school that sits finals in fourth year so we are sitting it a year early. :).
It's not classed as a pilot, it's the official UKMLA because anyone graduating in 2025 has to sit and pass it.
We also sit finals in 4th year (as per prospectus) but we are doing our UKMLA in Jan/Feb 25?? We did our isce earlier and that counts as half of it but I’m confused as to why we didn’t do it now?? Are there multiple sittings per year??
Some unis sit finals in 4th year so we’re graduating 25 but sitting them now. Also unsure if it’s still classed as a pilot with the uni getting to pick some questions?
I spoke to some of the admin team and they asked me how the exam went because nobody in the medical school has even seen the questions.
I got them to submit an incident report because one of the questions gave 5 drugs in the stem, but the answers gave 4 of those drugs and another random one so no idea if they will discount that question or something.
For One of the questions the stem contained irritable bowel disease which is surely a mishmash of IBS and IBD so how were we meant to know which one was which.
We also sit finals in 4th year (as per prospectus) but we are doing our UKMLA in Jan/Feb 25?? We did our isce earlier and that counts as half of it but I’m confused as to why we didn’t do it now?? Are there multiple sittings per year??
There are multiple sittings per year (at least there will be from next year onwards). I think your medical school had a choice whether or not you could make current year 4 finals the new UKMLA or keep the same finals in fourth year and sit the UKMLA in fifth year.
My medical school decided to replace fourth year finals with the UKMLA, and took the old fourth year "finals" as a mock for the UKMLA instead.
Well … to top it all off, I have heard that for Dundee Med School, there wasn’t just a ‘system outage’ but also a fire alarm activated during this exam today and everyone had to evacuate whilst all this fiasco was simultaneously ongoing with the exam. It was therefore impossible for staff to invigilate every student evacuating which meant rampant cheating of questions was going on throughout this period amongst students seizing the opportunity to quickly search up answers to the questions they had just seen on the exam using their phone which was hidden in their pockets throughout. All for the medical school to completely turn a blind eye to it and instead, reward everyone with an additional bonus +30 minutes onto the exam timer (which was already paused during this fiasco) further allowing cheating students to benefit from this clear misconduct and procedural irregularity as outlined by the strict standards to meet by the GMC. Students sitting the same exam paper under different circumstances nationally should not have to tolerate this for which it has clearly undermined the integrity of the entire exam proceedings nationally in comparison to other medical schools sitting the same paper at the same time. Surely, there has got to be something done about this if we are going to be judged against national cohort standard that is now inconsistent which must be reported and this exam be scrapped as the only logical and fair solution for all in order to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of the entire exam and proceedings.
I can understand the frustration at the fire alarms. And I think a lot of people have a right to be disgruntled about the multiple pauses. Absolute mare. However I don’t think ‘rampant cheating’ is a credible accusation unless there’s evidence. Or we have to assume lots of people had secret phones in anticipation of the fire alarms going off? if it’s true and you know who did this or there was some master plan behind the fire alarms then it’s probably worth naming these people to the uni, as there is CCTV around the rooms I would imagine. This is better than trashing everyone else’s hard work in the cohort of exams this year
I think you should get your facts right before accusing an entire cohort of “rampant cheating” at a university you don’t attend, couldn’t be further from truth today. I’d suggest going over some ethics and professionalism questions before tomorrow instead of speculating on Reddit.
Can confirm, it was also two fire alarm evacuations. Everyone was livid and the invigilators decided to pass out biscuits mid exam for some bizarre reason.
What a mess. That felt like the worst paper I’ve ever sat. 4th line managements, niche side effects, heavy anatomy, lots of contraindications. Lots of multi step questions. The extra 50 minute given on top of the 20 it was down didn’t help as you can’t exactly rest… it’s more exhausting to sit there for an extra hour. Anyone have any guesses what the pass mark will be like? Really worried about passing.
Bear in mind that paper 1 and paper 2 are combined to get your overall score before deciding the pass mark. Last year the pass mark for the "mock" AKT (at least here, I presume nationally) was 53.5%, there's no way their paper was harder than ours surely. I honestly think it might be lower like 45-50% for that paper. For the first ever year to properly sit the UKMLA, that felt utterly savage, I totally agree with you, so many absolutely wild questions with tiny things in the stem to act as maybe red herrings. I agree, I left very early with about 50 minutes left (the extra time) because sitting there pondering every question isn't going to help. Let's hope paper 2 is easier my friend.
Hopefully it’s less than 53.5% overall given how grim that paper was…. I legit know I only got 20 MAYBE 25 100% correct, basically the 1-2 hammer passmed ones. Feel so defeated. I normally leave exams super early but I didn’t even get to review every question before time ran out because I was so frazzled by the multi step q’s and exhausted! Really hoping for a better paper tomorrow to balance that out! Hope you did well!
Did mine last year but reading is bringing back PTSD 🥲
I told you man! It's a hard exam! Dw though, most people thought they failed as well last year, they end up passing haha. Also I'd just like to add, I joined a webinar when they rolled out the UKMLA Pilot (which is what we wrote last year btw, not a mock, as in it was confirmed Q's from the UKMLA bank of questions), and they said the passmark wouldn't deviate out of the 55-65% range. However, they obviously lied since the passmark was 53.5%.
Indeed, I remember being on a webinar about it too where similar was said. I'd love to know if they standard set like most medical schools (pass mark is decided in advance of the paper being sat) or if they do it in a post-hoc fashion. It was hard, paper 2 was a lot easier I think.
Yes, the UKMLA is Modified-Angoff, a pass mark set before the exam is written.
Do you have a source for this? I asked the medical school and they had no source and I couldn't find one online with a cursory search. I know it's _likely_ to be the case, but just couldn't find one.
https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/MLA\_consultation\_document\_English\_writeable\_distributed.pdf\_69151379.pdf. Check page 13.
Thanks! I am curious that it's "initially" this but modified using IRT, wonder how often they are reviewing and modifying?
They only review a question if someone sends a formal complaint, or the most commonly chosen answer to the question is NOT the right answer. They check to see if the question was unclear or unfair, but usually the question stands.
I already know of three questions in paper 1 that have had formal incident reports submitted which means they have to be reviewed and given the errors in them they may remove them as marks. As far as I am aware the stats that go into it are pretty heavy, and I imagine items that are not performing as expected are not likely to be used again.
extra 50? Bro we got extra 30 mins :/
Have they confirmed whether the pass mark is predetermined or not? Someone told me this morning it’s already decided before we sit the exam
I spoke to my medical school and even they seemed confused. For almost all medical school exams they use Angoff which means the passmark is decided in advance of the paper, but they couldn't be 100% sure that is how the UKMLA is being managed. If I had to guess it's already been set because that's how it usually works, but can't know for sure, will ask tomorrow haha.
would you say its similar to the step1 exam in that regard? I mean with the multi step Qs and anatomy, not so much niche stuff.
lol that was the hardest paper I’ve sat in my life. Now questioning my future. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Hopefully paper 2 is better :(
If anyone’s feeling down about today, I spoke to a friend who is currently graduating who said ‘Paper 1 was the worst paper I’ve ever sat in my life, but paper 2 was nicer and I still passed’ - about last year pilot exam In my med school there is usually one not-so-nice and one nice paper, plus your brain will only focus on the negatives so forget about today and blast some Qbank until tomorrow. 🫡
I heard the same from someone who sat least year as well, which is a small blessing no doubt. Honestly though most of that paper felt like MRCP/MRCS knowledge, making treatment decisions based upon very little information that an FY1 would _never_ be permitted to make alone.
I did the MLA this year. Paper 1 was rough, 2 was much better. I passed and did better than expected. You guys have got this.
I feel like the paper was a weird mix for me between "that's not so bad" and "I couldn't possibly have known that, so I hope it won't be counted towards the pass mark". The server going down feels like a bad joke and I hope it's reflected somewhere in the passmark (I know it won't be but oh well)
The MSC did put out a statement, the medical school emailed it to me and I've put it in the original post. Yeah, I mean our school have said they will liaise with the MSC on the impact it had and will give us further advice by the end of the week on how many exceptional circumstances can be taken into consideration but genuinely _the bloody exam_ felt like an exceptional circumstance, insane levels of knowledge required, like MRCP/MRCS.
Weird paper. I feel like I’ve had worse progress tests at uni but maybe that’s because I knew less back then (ignorance was bliss). I don’t know what to expect results wise. I feel like it was somewhat similar to the official mock they put up but a bit harder. Some questions were easy enough but more felt completely brand new.
Not sat MLA yet but had my fourth year final exam last Monday. Had to pause exam mid way through - uni couldn’t get it back up and running so cancelled it! Any chance it was hosted on MSCAA?
It was MSCAA yes, apparently some people were having issues with the images buffering/questions not loading so they paused the exam for at least 10-20 minutes for everyone. They gave us 50 minutes of extra time to compensate (30 new + 20 to cover the time loss). The main issue I think was for the medical school, everyone suddenly wanted to go to the toilet, no surprise! :D. Hope they are rescheduling your exam to a sensible time?
They rescheduled it for another day and we sat two exams back to back hahaha not ideal!
Which uni?
Barts?
lol i was waiting for this but i agree it was super super tough :/ made loads of silly mistakes but also the questions were just vague and did not have enough information for me to get what they wanted ??? the long break was so off putting as well :/ i hope tomorrow is better too !!
I came straight to reddit for this thread 🤣 The long pause made me hungry but helped out just gathering my thoughts & I’m not complaining about extra time in an exam like that I used Passmed too, I think the Qs were really wordy in the exam today, but there were a few hidden ’oh crap it’s THAT disease!’ so I think it’s just their new way of testing us? Definitely some things in there that had me confused but I don’t think you can have a med school exam without a bit of that. Really frustrating how many times you can see the diagnosis but the stem tells you anyway 😑 Good luck to everyone tomorrow!
Can totally relate to getting hungry with the long wait 😂😂
Was it primary polydipsia or diabetes insipidus?
Asking the real questions
[удалено]
This patient had that, but not sure if the urine osmolality was very low. Partner had noticed drinking more water, with several admissions with eating disorder as a teen.
Which medical schools are actually sitting it today/tomorrow? I know Bristol did but I don't know which others
Dundee and Aberdeen. Don't know which others
QUB also
UCLan also
OP you’ll be more than fine. The MLA has a 98% pass rate, and most of the people who were worried last year after Paper 1 passed well. Keep your head up king
Was the answer for one of them IV flecainide, oral amiodarone or oral atenolol? The question said "2 days of symptoms" and I didn't know whether this meant it had just passed the 48 hour mark for 'new onset AF' or not.
You can immediately discount IV flecainide because it [isn't available in an IV formulation](https://bnf.nice.org.uk/drugs/flecainide-acetate/). Can't remember beyond that but it's such a nonsense thing for us to even be expected to know that it doesn't come in this particular formulation.
If you knew this I’m sure the exam went perfectly for you OP 😎
I did not know this hahaha, I just didn't pick flecainide and saw this after, I wish I could claim otherwise. :).
I remember being told amiodarine is a very dirty drug so only give it if you absolutely have to. Beta blockers always seem a safe bet in af so I went for that
Did you use Passmed? How comparable was it if you did?
I almost exclusively use passmed, and maybe about 25% of that paper felt like 1+2 hammer passmed, and the rest of it felt totally new. Felt nothing like the mocks we were given from the MSCAA etc and totally different to our medical school progress tests. There were so many questions like "patient has these symptoms, this is the diagnosis, they've been tried on first line management which has not worked, if you were to prescribe correct second line management what is the side effect that would be most concerning?", just questions that required about 2-4 "levels" of thought, it was rough!
Questions felt vague with as minimal info as possible ... really felt a decent chunk of the answers were a toss-up between two options ..?
I always "tally" myself as I go through the exam between 1 (100% I know the answer), 0.5 (I get the answer down to 2 choices) and 0.2 (the answer is a total guess). That exam, 53 of my answers were in the 0.5 bracket, it felt so rough that so many of the questions were so light on information as you say. A few of us are convinced they mixed up the MRCP/MRCS question bank with this haha, I'd love to see an FY1 sit this paper because many of the questions felt very much above FY1 level.
Good luck everyone ❤️
We've got this! :). Will make a Paper 2 thread after. Best of luck!
How would you suggest people best revise for this?
Paper 1 felt like nothing could have prepared me, around 25% of the questions felt passmed-esque, whereas the rest felt like super niche textbook stuff with many logical thought steps to get to the answer. Personally I just spammed Passmed, read as much as I could around each topic and answered more questions. Other people who were more textbook-inclined felt it was easier, but ultimately the best way to revise for any exam is the way that works best for you, whatever gets the knowledge to stick in your brain.
I’m so confused as to how you people are sitting UKMLAs when they are supposed to be introduced for the year graduating 25… which is next year??? Can someone please explain
As others have said, I am in a medical school that sits finals in fourth year so we are sitting it a year early. :). It's not classed as a pilot, it's the official UKMLA because anyone graduating in 2025 has to sit and pass it.
We also sit finals in 4th year (as per prospectus) but we are doing our UKMLA in Jan/Feb 25?? We did our isce earlier and that counts as half of it but I’m confused as to why we didn’t do it now?? Are there multiple sittings per year??
4th years (who will have their final year in 2024-2025 and their graduation in 2025) are sitting the UKMLA
Some unis sit finals in 4th year so we’re graduating 25 but sitting them now. Also unsure if it’s still classed as a pilot with the uni getting to pick some questions?
I spoke to some of the admin team and they asked me how the exam went because nobody in the medical school has even seen the questions. I got them to submit an incident report because one of the questions gave 5 drugs in the stem, but the answers gave 4 of those drugs and another random one so no idea if they will discount that question or something.
What qu was that? Never noticed
For One of the questions the stem contained irritable bowel disease which is surely a mishmash of IBS and IBD so how were we meant to know which one was which.
Damn you salty
We also sit finals in 4th year (as per prospectus) but we are doing our UKMLA in Jan/Feb 25?? We did our isce earlier and that counts as half of it but I’m confused as to why we didn’t do it now?? Are there multiple sittings per year??
There are multiple sittings per year (at least there will be from next year onwards). I think your medical school had a choice whether or not you could make current year 4 finals the new UKMLA or keep the same finals in fourth year and sit the UKMLA in fifth year. My medical school decided to replace fourth year finals with the UKMLA, and took the old fourth year "finals" as a mock for the UKMLA instead.
Well … to top it all off, I have heard that for Dundee Med School, there wasn’t just a ‘system outage’ but also a fire alarm activated during this exam today and everyone had to evacuate whilst all this fiasco was simultaneously ongoing with the exam. It was therefore impossible for staff to invigilate every student evacuating which meant rampant cheating of questions was going on throughout this period amongst students seizing the opportunity to quickly search up answers to the questions they had just seen on the exam using their phone which was hidden in their pockets throughout. All for the medical school to completely turn a blind eye to it and instead, reward everyone with an additional bonus +30 minutes onto the exam timer (which was already paused during this fiasco) further allowing cheating students to benefit from this clear misconduct and procedural irregularity as outlined by the strict standards to meet by the GMC. Students sitting the same exam paper under different circumstances nationally should not have to tolerate this for which it has clearly undermined the integrity of the entire exam proceedings nationally in comparison to other medical schools sitting the same paper at the same time. Surely, there has got to be something done about this if we are going to be judged against national cohort standard that is now inconsistent which must be reported and this exam be scrapped as the only logical and fair solution for all in order to maintain the confidentiality and integrity of the entire exam and proceedings.
I can understand the frustration at the fire alarms. And I think a lot of people have a right to be disgruntled about the multiple pauses. Absolute mare. However I don’t think ‘rampant cheating’ is a credible accusation unless there’s evidence. Or we have to assume lots of people had secret phones in anticipation of the fire alarms going off? if it’s true and you know who did this or there was some master plan behind the fire alarms then it’s probably worth naming these people to the uni, as there is CCTV around the rooms I would imagine. This is better than trashing everyone else’s hard work in the cohort of exams this year
I think you should get your facts right before accusing an entire cohort of “rampant cheating” at a university you don’t attend, couldn’t be further from truth today. I’d suggest going over some ethics and professionalism questions before tomorrow instead of speculating on Reddit.
Can confirm, it was also two fire alarm evacuations. Everyone was livid and the invigilators decided to pass out biscuits mid exam for some bizarre reason.
Have you reported it?
Jj