5 Biggest Mistakes GP Trainees Make in the MRCGP AKT (And How to Fix Them)
Most GP trainees who underperform in the MRCGP AKT are not short on knowledge. That is the pattern I keep seeing, sitting after sitting, having taught AKT preparation for well over a decade and worked through this exam with thousands of GP trainees. Candidates revise for months, cover an enormous volume of material, and still lose marks in the same handful of places.
None of the five mistakes below are about how much a candidate knows. They are about technique, structure and where attention gets placed during revision, and all five are fixable with a few weeks of deliberate attention rather than a few more months of general reading. Here they are, in the order they tend to do the most damage.
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Mistake 1: Preparing for a knowledge test when the AKT is really a decision test
Eighty per cent of the AKT sits under clinical medicine, which naturally pushes candidates toward the assumption that knowing more facts is what wins marks. In my experience of reviewing mocks and seeing trainees’ reasoning first hand, the truth is quite different. Candidates consistently find it harder to select the answer that involves doing nothing, when not investigating, not prescribing and not referring is actually the safest, most guideline-aligned choice. That instinct to intervene is entirely reasonable in a busy clinic, where being cautious rarely gets criticised. In the exam, it costs marks.
A closely related pattern shows up around investigations. Trainees are often asked to choose the single most appropriate test to confirm a diagnosis, not every test that could reasonably be justified, and the pull toward a broader, more thorough approach, the way it might happen in real practice, leads to the wrong answer. The same applies to management questions asking for the next step, where the temptation is to select something that might become relevant later rather than what is needed right now. It also helps to remember that current guidance in this context usually means national bodies such as NICE, rather than the broader day to day resources that you may reach for in clinic.
None of this is really a knowledge gap. It is a technique gap, and it only closes once you start deliberately practising the skill of choosing restraint over intervention, and precision over breadth. When you work through question bank explanations, the more useful habit is not checking whether you got the answer right, but understanding why the correct option was the single most appropriate one rather than merely a defensible one. This is one of the reasons the live teaching within the AKT Ultimate Package spends real time on technique and reasoning, not just content delivery, because the two are not the same skill.
Mistake 2: Starting revision without mapping it to the curriculum
A common starting point for AKT preparation is opening a question bank and letting its topic order set the pace. It feels productive, and for a while it is. The problem is that a question bank’s structure is not the same as the GP curriculum’s structure, and gaps between the two tend to surface for the first time in the exam itself, which is the worst possible moment to discover them.
I see this constantly with trainees who feel confident going in. They have done thousands of questions, yet certain curriculum areas, often women’s health, data interpretation or general practice organisation, were never deliberately targeted, simply covered incidentally by whichever bank they used. A workable revision plan does not need to be complicated. Count the weeks available, decide which curriculum domains will be covered by which point, and set a realistic weekly target for question practice alongside guideline reading.
If it helps to have a structure already built rather than creating one from scratch, the free Arora AKT daily planner maps this out week by week across all three domains, and is worth downloading before you start rather than partway through.
Mistake 3: Sticking to the topics that already feel comfortable
This is one of the most consistent patterns I see, year after year. Neurology comes up again and again, particularly candidates struggling to recognise and distinguish different patterns of gait disturbance. Ophthalmology, palliative symptom control and interpreting practice-level data are not far behind. None of these are obscure or unfairly niche topics. They are simply the areas trainees are least likely to revise voluntarily, because they feel less familiar than cardiovascular or respiratory medicine.
There is a reasonable explanation for why these particular areas keep resurfacing. In real practice, a lot of this care is delivered by other members of the primary care team, a practice nurse running long-term condition reviews, an optometrist managing routine eye complaints, so trainees simply see less of it first-hand. That is a fair reason for a gap to exist. It is not a good reason to leave it unaddressed, because the AKT tests the standard expected of an independent GP regardless of who usually manages a particular presentation day to day.
The instinct to keep revising what already feels manageable is human, and it is also precisely why self-assessment by gut feeling tends to be unreliable. It is far more useful to let your actual performance data tell you where the gaps are, rather than your comfort level. This is exactly the problem the AI-guided weak area targeting inside the Arora AKT question bank is built to solve. Rather than relying on a trainee correctly guessing which curriculum topics they are weakest in, it surfaces the pattern from actual answered questions, including the topics that feel fine right up until they are tested properly
Mistake 4: Preparing in complete isolation
A lot of AKT preparation happens entirely alone, a laptop, a question bank, and months of quiet, solitary revision. For some trainees this works well enough. For most, it quietly works against them, and not for the reason people usually assume.
The issue isn’t motivation. It’s that reasoning tested only against yourself has nowhere to go wrong out loud. You can read a question, talk yourself into an answer, get it right or wrong, and move on, without ever hearing how someone else worked through the same scenario, or discovering that your interpretation of a piece of guidance was slightly off in a way you’d never have caught alone. Some of the most useful learning in AKT preparation doesn’t come from more questions. It comes from the moment someone else explains their reasoning differently to yours, and you realise your version had a gap in it. That moment simply doesn’t happen in isolation.
There’s also a quieter cost. Preparing entirely solo, for months, for an exam this demanding, tends to feed exactly the kind of self-doubt that makes revision harder, not easier. Trainees start to wonder whether everyone else is further ahead, whether their pace is normal, whether the parts they find hard are hard for everyone or just for them. Almost none of that is true, but it’s very hard to know that when there’s no one else in the room to compare notes with.
This is a large part of why the AKT Ultimate Package includes weekly live drop-in AKT clinics, not scripted lectures, but genuine group sessions covering topics, questions and whatever trainees bring along that week, so revision has a shared, spoken dimension rather than existing only on a screen. It’s also why the National AKT WhatsApp Teaching Group exists, so you’re preparing alongside other trainees sitting the same exam at the same time, rather than working through months of revision without anyone to check your thinking against.
Mistake 5: Treating statistics and evidence-based practice as an optional extra
Evidence-based practice carries only ten per cent of the marks, sixteen questions out of a hundred and sixty, which makes it easy to mentally file away as a low priority next to the eighty per cent given to clinical medicine. In my experience, this section consistently scores lower than clinical questions, and the gap between the two is rarely small.
What makes this mistake worth calling out specifically is not that trainees lack the aptitude for statistics. It is that many quietly deprioritise it out of discomfort with numbers, without realising that this is one of the most learnable sections of the entire exam. Confidence intervals, number needed to treat, sensitivity and specificity, and interpreting a forest plot are governed by a small, fixed set of rules that do not shift the way clinical presentations can. A few focused hours spent properly understanding these concepts, rather than trying to memorise formulas without the underlying logic, tends to produce a disproportionately large improvement in this domain compared with the same hours spent on broad clinical revision.
This is exactly why dedicated statistics elements built into the AKT Ultimate Package exist as their own components rather than being folded into general question practice, because this domain rewards focused teaching more than passive repetition.
What this means for your revision
None of these five mistakes are really about how hard a trainee has worked. All five are patterns worth naming clearly, because a vague, unnamed weakness is hard to fix, and a specific, well-understood one is not.
What you can do about each one:
– Practice choosing restraint, not just correct diagnoses. When reviewing question bank answers, ask why the correct option was the single most appropriate one, not merely a reasonable one.
– Build a revision plan against the curriculum itself, not against a question bank’s own structure.
– Let your actual weak area data decide where you revise next, not which topics feel comfortable.
– Don’t prepare in complete isolation. Talk through your reasoning with other trainees regularly, not just at the end when you’re already unsure.
– Give statistics dedicated, focused time rather than leaving it to whatever is left over. It is one of the most learnable ten per cent of marks in the whole exam.
The AKT has a good pass rate for candidates who prepare this way, and first-time candidates who have prepared deliberately tend to do considerably better than those resitting after an unstructured first attempt. That reflects preparation quality, not luck.
How Arora Medical Education Can Help:
Clear Teaching Built for Busy Trainees
If you want a guided path, our AKT resources help you build confidence at each step. Everything is created by senior UK doctors with experience in the exam and in teaching.
You can choose:
– AKT Ultimate – a full AKT preparation system with question banks, videos, audios, live teaching, flashcards and more.
– Individual resources such as audios, videos, question banks or mocks.
Each option follows a clear plan that helps you stay organised and focused. Explore these more here.
Also:
– Join National AKT WhatsApp Teaching Group here
– Get AKT Updates and Teaching Emails here
– Register for next Free AKT Webinar here
Author Bio — Dr Aman Arora
Hi! I’m Dr. Aman Arora, a Portfolio GP with over a decade of clinical and teaching experience, dedicated to helping doctors achieve their goals with confidence. Having had the privilege of supporting more than 50,000 doctors worldwide across exams such as MRCGP AKT, SCA, MSRA, PLAB 2 and PLAB 1, I understand the challenges you face and the strategies needed to overcome them. Through personalised face-to-face sessions, engaging online courses, mocks, audio and a vibrant social media community, we’re here to guide you every step of the way.
Whether you’re looking to pass crucial exams or take the next big step in your medical career, we’re here to help you succeed. Feel free to get in touch with any thoughts, questions, or ideas — I look forward to working with you and being part of your journey.
Author Bio — Dr Pooja Arora
Dr Pooja Arora is a GP with a background in Medical Politics, where she passionately focuses on improving the opportunities and working conditions for junior doctors. She is proud to hold FRCGP (Fellow of Royal College of General Practitioners).
You can find out more about Pooja’s previous roles and qualifications here.
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