Core Revision
I failed the AKT — what now?
Dr Laura YoungSpecialist Adviser, Educational Design & Neuro-inclusion · 4 min read
Written August 2026
First, the thing nobody says clearly enough on the day the result arrives: this is a setback in an exam, not a verdict on whether you will be a good GP. Those are genuinely different things, and the distance between them is larger than it feels this week.
Between roughly one in five and one in three candidates does not pass any given sitting. You are not an outlier, and you are certainly not alone in your cohort — you are just the one who knows.
Give it a few days. Almost every decision made in the first forty-eight hours after a fail — about resitting immediately, about whether general practice is for you, about what it says about your intelligence — is made by someone who is not yet in a position to make it well.
What actually happens next
To resit, you make a fresh application in the next booking period. Sittings run in January, April, July and October, so the next one is never more than three months away.
You have a limited number of attempts — four if you were already in GP training on 1 August 2023, six if you entered for the first time on or after 2 August 2023. If you believe there was an error in your marks, there is a formal route to request a review, which is separate from appealing a fail. Both are on the College’s website, and both have deadlines.
Resitting? See where you stand first.
Twenty original AKT questions in the exam's 80/10/10 split: sixteen clinical, two on evidence-based practice and two on organisation and management, with the reasoning after every one and a marked report. Free, no card and the first five are open to all.
Diagnose before you revise
The commonest mistake after a fail is to revise harder in the same way. Before you open a question bank again, work out which of three things actually happened: you did not know enough, you knew it but ran out of time, or you knew it and misread what was being asked. Those have completely different fixes, and revising more only solves the first.
Say it out loud to someone
Tell your educational supervisor or trainer early, even though that is the conversation you least want. Two reasons: they have almost certainly supported other trainees through exactly this, and the College’s own guide asks you to discuss your readiness to resit with your Educational Supervisor or Training Programme Director. Carrying it alone makes it heavier and does not make it faster.
Change one structural thing
Not everything — one thing. Move from untimed practice to timed. Switch from single-topic sets to mixed ones. Book protected time rather than hoping for it. A single structural change you actually sustain will do more than a resolution to work harder, which is not a plan and tends to dissolve within a fortnight.
If it is affecting more than your revision
Exam failure lands on people who have rarely failed anything, in a profession where competence and identity are tightly bound together. If it is affecting your sleep, your work, or how you feel about yourself more broadly, that is a common and treatable response, not a character flaw.
Your educational supervisor and training programme director are the first port of call, and there are confidential services for doctors specifically — NHS Practitioner Health, and the BMA’s 24/7 counselling and peer support line, which is open to all doctors whether or not they are members. Using them is unremarkable.
Failing an exam you prepared for is a genuinely hard thing, and treating it as a diagnosis rather than a disaster is what makes the second attempt different. Find the specific fault. It is nearly always more specific than it feels.
— Dr Laura Young, Specialist Adviser, Educational Design & Neuro-inclusion
One more thing. The candidates we see pass comfortably on a resit are rarely the ones who worked the most hours in between. They are the ones who found out precisely what went wrong and fixed that, rather than starting again from the beginning out of a sense that they ought to.
