How to prepare for the UCAT

The UCAT, an aptitude exam that is required for most UK medical schools. It is a big challenge to overcome and it can be the make or break of your application. Proper preparation can be the difference between getting an interview at your dream university and being unsuccessful. In order to do well, it’s important to know how each section works and which resources you can use to prepare best.

What does the UCAT involve?

Many students go into the UCAT without a proper understanding of the exam style and the number of questions in each section. This puts them at a massive disadvantage. They can’t ration their time properly, usually spending far too long in the first few questions of each section.

Understanding how long you have for each question helps you time yourself whenever you are doing practice questions with pen and paper. Try to do all practice questions in exam timing, spending 2 minutes on each question when you only have 15 seconds won’t help you much when preparing for the real test.

How to start preparing?

The best thing to do at the beginning when preparing is to complete a practice paper. This gives you an average baseline score. Through that, you can identify which topics you should focus your attention on. After that, spread out your past papers across the time frame you are preparing for and use them to reflect on how you can modify the practice you are doing. It is usually best to build up preparation for the UCAT across many weeks. This means doing perhaps a couple of hours of work every day for the first week, and then building it up by one or two hours per week. In doing so, you avoid burning out.

Which resources should you be using?

There are so many resources out there, and before long it’s easy to drown in all the different courses and books! The 1,250 UKCAT practice questions book is very useful. It’s brilliant for doing questions on the go. The questions in it are slightly more challenging than in the actual UCAT, which means you can stretch yourself a bit more to make yourself ready for the exam.

At the end of the day, most people end up using similar resources. What really differentiates those who do well from those who do less well is how they use them. This is where tutors can step in. They can help you identify which areas you are weak in, and which areas you should invest the most time in. Having a second opinion also helps in helping you see the bigger picture with your preparation. Some students end up obsessing about making their performance on one section close to perfect. In doing so, they neglect the other sections, and so tend to do worse overall. On top of that, tutors can give you these little snippets of wisdom that can help you when you feel your score is plateauing.

Top tips for each section

When it comes to VR, one of the biggest flaws of students is that they don’t read the question first. This leaves them reading the passage, having to read the questions, then rereading the passage to find the relevant information. Reading the question helps prime your brain for what information you're looking for so that when you read the passage. You can immediately select the important stuff, and forget about the rest.

Decision Making

In order to maximize your marks for decision-making, it’s important to understand that decision-making is quite broad and so tests lots of different elements. These elements can be categorized into deductive reasoning (your ability to make conclusions or inferences from texts), argument evaluation (selecting which elements of an argument can strengthen or weaken it), and statistical analysis. With argument evaluation, it might be useful to try some BMAT section 1 practice questions to really challenge yourself.

Quantitative Reasoning

For quantitative reasoning, your speed on the online calculator can really affect your score. Make sure you are using the numeric keypad on the right-hand side of your keyboard. These will make calculations much quicker. It’s useful to spend a few days practicing typing in numbers and functions quickly using the keypad. The more time you save on this trivial task, the more time you have to address the question!

Abstract Reasoning

Without a game plan, abstract reasoning can be annoying. You can be just left there clueless about how to approach the question. It's best to approach it in a logical way. Spend the first five or so seconds to see if you can identify the pattern in the sets presented. If not, go through a list of trends and differences in the sets by looking at the color, angle, type, size, position, edges, number, intersections, and symmetry of the shapes.

Situational Judgement

Situational judgment is marked in a slightly different way but remains important. In general, it's far less time-pressured. This gives you the chance to read through the scenarios thoroughly. It’s advised to read through the GMC “Good medical practice” document to get an idea of what is expected of a doctor. This can give you a great foundation of knowledge for approaching the situational judgment section.

Approach it all with a growth mindset

It’s important to approach the UCAT with a growth mindset. You can improve your UCAT score with focused and relevant practice. So it’s important to keep working hard. If you’re finding that you’ve plateaued and are no longer improving, it might be useful to get a tutor who will give you a different perspective and find areas to improve which you may have missed.