What Is the MRCGP SCA

To CCT and qualify as a GP in the UK, you must pass 3 components of the MRCGP: the Applied Knowledge Test, the Workplace Based Assessment, and the SCA. The SCA is the consultation component. It assesses your ability to integrate and apply clinical, professional and communication skills, which is the RCGP's own description of its purpose, and it is taken from the ST3 year of training.

The SCA has been the permanent clinical exam since November 2023. It replaced the Recorded Consultation Assessment, which was itself a temporary measure introduced during the pandemic to replace the in person Clinical Skills Assessment. Unlike the CSA, which required travel to an exam centre in London, the SCA is delivered remotely, which is worth understanding properly because the remote format shapes both the logistics and the consulting skills the exam rewards.

The SCA is an assessment of 12 simulated consultations, each lasting 12 minutes, completed in a single session. You sit it remotely from a local GP surgery, usually your own training practice, using an online examination platform on a properly set up computer. Trained role players join each consultation, most by video and some by audio only, which replicates telephone consulting. Most cases involve the role player as your patient, but some involve a carer, a relative or another member of the healthcare team, reflecting the reality that general practice involves consulting with more than just the patient themselves.

Before each consultation you are shown candidate instructions giving background information on the case, in the way you would screen your notes before calling a patient in. The exam is invigilated and closed book: you cannot use notes, textbooks or electronic references during the consultations, and your room must be set up to the RCGP's specification so the invigilation process can confirm you are working alone. There is no physical examination component, because examination skills are assessed elsewhere in training.

The 12 cases are mapped to the RCGP's 12 clinical experience groups, the blueprint that guarantees each sitting samples the breadth of general practice rather than clustering in one area, and the College advises candidates to prepare equally across all of them. The groups span the breadth of the job, from children and young people through reproductive and sexual health, long term conditions, older adults and frailty, mental health, urgent care, health disadvantage and safeguarding, ethnicity and culture, undifferentiated new presentations, prescribing, results handling, and professional dilemmas. The cases are drawn from a bank of hundreds, based on real patient consultations and selected to reflect the prevalence of conditions in general practice, pitched at the standard of a newly qualified GP. You cannot predict which groups will appear in your sitting.

Each of your 12 cases is marked independently by a different examiner, so across the exam you are assessed by at least 12 examiners. Marks are awarded in 3 domains: Data Gathering and Diagnosis, Clinical Management and Medical Complexity, and Relating to Others, with each domain graded Clear Pass, Pass, Fail or Clear Fail against the standard of a newly qualified GP. There is no fixed number of cases you must pass; your performance is combined across the whole exam and the pass threshold is set for each sitting. The full breakdown of the domains and what examiners reward in each is in The 3 SCA Marking Domains Explained.

To sit the SCA you must be in ST3. The exam is not open earlier in training. You also need active RCGP membership, which you will already hold as part of your training, and your training details correctly recorded with the College. These are rarely a problem in practice, but a quick check before you book does no harm.

If you have a disability, a health condition or another circumstance that affects how you can sit the exam, the RCGP operates a reasonable adjustments process, and applications need to be made in advance through the College. The RCGP also publishes a comfort aid list setting out items candidates may have with them without prior approval. You are also permitted a blank whiteboard and pen, or paper and pen, for making notes during consultations, shown to be blank at the start and destroyed afterwards. Confirm the current permitted items on the RCGP site before your sitting, and if a reasonable adjustment applies to you, read the College's guidance early, because adjustment applications have their own timelines.

The SCA is delivered across 9 months of the year, so there are regular opportunities to sit the exam. Each sitting runs over a small number of examination days, and you are allocated a morning or afternoon session rather than choosing an exact slot. Confirmed dates and booking windows are published on the RCGP website, and because later sittings are sometimes confirmed closer to the time, the RCGP's exam applications page is the place to check rather than any third party site.

The regularity of sittings has a useful planning consequence: if you are not ready, waiting for the next sitting usually costs you weeks rather than the better part of a year, which changes the calculation about sitting before you are prepared.

Correct as of July 2026. This area is changing, so check current guidance before you rely on it.

The SCA fee is £1,207 per attempt, the same for a first sit or a re-sit.

Since the June 2026 resident doctor contract, the first 2 attempts of the SCA are reimbursed for GP registrars in England, for exams sat from 1 April 2026. Three things to know:

• You pay the RCGP upfront and claim it back through your trust. It is not a waiver.

• The trust claim process is still bedding in, so confirm yours before relying on it.

• England only. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not covered.

From April 2026 the RCGP takes the fee in stages across reservation and booking. Check the deadlines on the RCGP's applying for the SCA page and diarise them, since missing one can cost you your place.

On tax: your study budget funds courses, not the exam, so the fee sits outside it. If you pay for an attempt you cannot reclaim (a third sit, say), you can recover the tax through HMRC. Until reimbursement is smooth at your trust, budget the fee as an upfront cost and claim it back after.

Booking runs through the RCGP itself, not through any external platform. The College operates a reservation system for each sitting, after which booking is confirmed and paid through your RCGP account, with the College communicating your booking steps by email. 2 practical rules will keep this smooth. First, sort your eligibility, membership status and any reasonable adjustment application well before the sitting you want, because those cannot be fixed at the last minute. Second, treat every date the RCGP gives you as hard, because reservation windows, payment deadlines and booking confirmations all close on schedule.

After the exam, results are released through your RCGP account a number of weeks after the sitting, accompanied by feedback mapped to the marking domains. What that feedback means, statement by statement, is decoded in Decoding the RCGP SCA Feedback Statements.

The mechanics matter because they remove surprises, but they are the easy part. The exam itself is won or lost on consultation skill under time pressure, and the next thing worth understanding properly is exactly how you will be judged, which is covered in The 3 SCA Marking Domains Explained.

When you are ready to start practising, our case library has 79 SCA practice cases built directly from the RCGP curriculum, each with a candidate brief, patient script, marking scheme and learning points. It is free to use, with no paywall, whenever it would help.