Test Day

Test day: what to bring, when to arrive, and the rules inside

Test-day rules are the same for the SMLE and the SNLE, because both are sat at the same Prometric centres under the same procedures. Most of what goes wrong on this day goes wrong before the exam starts: arriving late, an ID that does not match, a permit left at home.

Before you leave the house

  • Your scheduling permit, on paper or on your phone. Either is accepted.
  • Unexpired identification: a passport, or a national or residence identity card inside Saudi Arabia.
  • The name on your ID must match the name on your permit exactly.

Arrive without the permit or without acceptable identification and you will not be admitted, and you will pay a fee to reschedule within your eligibility period. These are entry conditions, not formalities.

Arriving and checking in

SCFHS test centres open at 7:30 a.m.

If you are more than 30 minutes late against the time on your admission ticket, or absent, you will not be allowed to sit and it counts as an attempt — unless you present acceptable, documented grounds that the supervising committee accepts under the assessment regulations.

One delay therefore costs you a quarter of your attempts for the year. Leave enough margin for traffic, not enough for a perfect morning.

Inside the centre

  • A security check before you enter to confirm you carry no prohibited items, repeated every time you return to the testing room after the break.
  • Your photo ID and fingerprint may be scanned electronically, and you sign the centre log.
  • Staff give you laminated writing surfaces and markers for notes and calculations, which you hand back at the end of the session.
  • Do not write on anything else — not your hand, not a tissue. Doing so can be recorded as irregular behaviour.
  • Sessions are monitored by test centre administrators in person and through audio and video recording.

Centre staff are not authorised to answer questions about registration, exam content or format, the testing software, scoring, or retesting. Those questions belong to the Commission, not the centre.

What counts as a violation

Every candidate agrees to keep exam material confidential, and that includes the questions themselves: you may not reproduce exam content by recording, memorisation or any other means, and you may not pass information about the content to anyone who may sit the exam or prepare others for it — which explicitly includes posting it online.

It is worth saying plainly, because a fair amount of the material circulating before exam sittings falls under exactly that. What you read on this platform comes from open, reviewed sources, not from questions carried out of a live exam.

Where this comes from

Every figure on this page is transcribed from the SMLE and SNLE applicant guides, published by the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties, in the edition on the Commission’s website, read on 31 August 2026.

SCFHS revises these guides from time to time. Before you apply, open the current guide on the Commission’s site and check for yourself: the official PDF. Any page on the internet, this one included, can lag behind the official document, and this is not a substitute for it.

SQB is an independent educational platform, not affiliated with the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties or with Prometric.