St George's Medical School, London: The Complete Applicant's Guide

A Cambridge Clinical admissions guide

A name you'll want to know first: the institution most people still call "St George's, University of London" is now officially City St George's, University of London, following its merger with City, University of London. The Tooting medical school, campus, course codes and admissions process are unchanged — but if you're searching for information yourself later, search under the new name too, or you may land on stale pages. This guide uses "St George's" throughout for familiarity, since that's still how the medical school and its interview format are commonly referred to.

St George's runs one of the most mechanically transparent — and most test-dependent — selection processes among London medical schools. It's also one of the few UK schools using a fully recorded, asynchronous interview: no live interviewer, no follow-up questions, just you, a camera, and a countdown timer. That single feature changes how you should prepare more than almost anything else in this guide.

Quick facts

Why applicants choose St George's

Because the medical school sits on the same site as a major South London teaching hospital and Level 1 trauma centre, clinical exposure at St George's starts in year one rather than being held back to later years — a genuine point of difference from schools with a more traditional pre-clinical/clinical split. Teaching combines case-based and problem-based learning, and the diversity of the surrounding population and clinical caseload is frequently cited as a strength of the placement experience.

Entry requirements (5-year A100)

A-level: AAA, including Chemistry and Biology (or Human Biology). General Studies and Key Skills are not accepted. St George's own course page notes that while AAA is the stated minimum, actual offers can range up to A*AA, so don't treat AAA as necessarily sufficient if you're aiming at the more competitive end of the applicant pool.

GCSE: Five subjects at grade 6/B or above, including English Language, Maths, and Science (double or triple award). GCSEs are used as a minimum bar only — they are not scored or ranked.

International Baccalaureate: 35 points overall, with 18 points at Higher Level, including a minimum grade 6 in both Biology and Chemistry.

Scottish Highers/Advanced Highers: AAA at Higher including Chemistry and Biology, plus AA at Advanced Higher including Chemistry and Biology.

Qualification age limit: With the exception of GCSEs, all qualifications for non-graduate applicants must have been completed within the previous five years, including the year of application. This is a firm rule rather than a guideline, so it's worth checking directly with admissions if your situation doesn't fit neatly (for example, older qualifications combined with a recent career change).

Deferred entry: Welcomed — but state your intention to defer at the point of application rather than deciding afterwards.

Transfers: Unusually for a UK medical school, St George's does consider transfer applicants from other medical schools — though transfers are directed into the four-year graduate-entry programme rather than the standard five-year course.

Work experience: Formal requirements were relaxed from the pandemic period onward, but applicants are still advised to seek out some relevant experience, in person or online, to demonstrate genuine insight into the realities of medicine and practising as a doctor.

Graduate entry: two different routes

St George's graduate options are genuinely flexible, and worth understanding properly because they're easy to conflate:

Route 1 — the 4-year Graduate Entry programme (A101), home applicants only. Open to graduates from any discipline, not just science backgrounds, provided you hold (or are completing) a 2:1 Honours degree. This route requires GAMSAT, not the UCAT, from an eligible sitting. There's no fixed minimum GAMSAT score published — instead, you're ranked against other GAMSAT-sitting applicants, so how well you need to score depends on that year's competition. If your degree was awarded more than five years ago, you'll need to demonstrate recent engagement in education through specific additional qualifications St George's will accept — worth confirming directly with admissions if this applies to you. This route is restricted to applicants with UK ("home") fee status; international graduates need to apply through the standard 5-year route instead.

Route 2 — the standard 5-year programme (A100), open to graduates too. If you're a graduate without a GAMSAT score, or you're an international graduate, you can apply to the standard 5-year course using the UCAT instead, following the same process as school-leaver applicants. This is worth knowing if GAMSAT doesn't suit you, or if your fee status rules out the four-year route.

How UCAT decides interview invitations (5-year route)

St George's process is unusually explicit about its own mechanics, which makes it easier to plan around than schools that keep more of the process opaque. Roughly, it works like this:

1. Applicants meeting the academic entry requirements are ranked purely by UCAT score — the personal statement plays no role at this stage.
2. Because St George's operates separate number caps for different applicant groups (Home, Graduate-route-via-UCAT, and International), each group is ranked and given its own cut-off separately — so the score you need to clear depends on which group you're in, not one universal threshold.
3. Interview places go to the highest scorers in each group until all available places are filled — St George's has previously interviewed somewhere in the region of 750–950 applicants a year, though this varies.
4. If the cut-off point lands on a score shared by multiple applicants, St George's states it may increase or reduce the total number of interviews offered so that everyone sharing that borderline score is treated equally, rather than arbitrarily admitting some and not others.

Two hard rules apply regardless of your overall score: you need a minimum of 500 in each individual UCAT section, and extenuating circumstances are not considered for admissions test scores — St George's is explicit that a bad day on test day, for whatever reason, can't be appealed.

On thresholds: St George's own recently published figures (2025 entry, on the old 3,600-point scale including Abstract Reasoning) were around 2,600 for home applicants and 2,750 for international applicants. Since the UCAT Consortium removed the Abstract Reasoning subtest from the 2026 sitting onward, the scale itself changed to a 2,700-point maximum, and reported comparable estimates for the new scale sit in the region of 1,947 (home) and 2,097 (international) — but these are converted estimates rather than freshly confirmed thresholds, so treat them as a directional guide and check St George's admissions statistics page for the actual current-cycle figures.

One recent change worth knowing: the SJT band is now factored into decision-making from 2026 entry onward, having previously played no role in the process at St George's — if you're working from older guidance that says SJT doesn't matter here, that's now out of date.

The interview: St George's SAMMI® format

This is the feature that most distinguishes St George's from other London schools, and it rewards a genuinely different kind of preparation. Rather than a live MMI circuit with a real interviewer in the room (or on the call), St George's uses SAMMI® — a recorded, asynchronous MMI. In practice, that means:

• You're presented with a set of pre-recorded questions — typically around six stations.
• For each one, you get a short reading/thinking period (commonly reported as roughly 60 seconds), then a fixed window (commonly reported as around 5 minutes) to record your own answer straight to camera.
• There's no interviewer to read your body language, prompt you, or ask a follow-up if you go off track — what you record in that window is what gets marked, with no opportunity for a second take.
• Because it's asynchronous, there's also no adapting to a real person's reactions in the moment — the entire skill being tested is structuring and delivering a clear, complete answer to camera, alone, on a timer.

Given this format, focused practice recording yourself answering timed questions — genuinely on camera, not just talking it through in your head — is disproportionately valuable for St George's specifically, more so than for schools running a live MMI circuit where you can read and adjust to an interviewer's reaction.

Interviews have historically run in an online window in early December, though exact dates shift by cycle — check St George's own admissions timeline for the current year's window rather than relying on a specific date from a previous cycle.

After interviews, MMI and SJT scores are combined and ranked, with offers going to the top-performing applicants within each group (Home, Graduate, International).

Admissions statistics (for context)

For 2024 entry, St George's received 1,388 home applications, invited 686 to interview (49%), and made 423 offers — around 30% of home applicants received an offer overall, and 62% of those interviewed went on to receive one. Figures for other recent cycles (for example, one report citing around 1,597 applicants for 184 places in a subsequent year) suggest broadly similar competitiveness, though exact application and place numbers do shift year to year and between reporting sources, so treat any single figure as indicative rather than fixed.

How Cambridge Clinical can help

St George's recorded, asynchronous interview format is different enough from a standard live MMI that generic interview coaching doesn't fully prepare you for it — the skill of delivering a complete, structured answer to a camera with no interviewer feedback and no second take needs its own practice. We run UCAT tuition, GAMSAT-track support for the graduate route, and mock SAMMI-style recorded interview practice, so the format itself isn't what trips you up on the day.

If you'd like a hand with any stage, visit cambridgeclinical.co.uk to find out more about our UCAT and GAMSAT tuition and St George's-specific interview coaching.

Figures and thresholds in this guide reflect recent application cycles and City St George's, University of London's own published admissions information. Entry requirements, UCAT/GAMSAT thresholds, and interview format can and do change year to year — always confirm current details against City St George's official Medicine MBBS course page before finalising your application.