When you wanted to get into the top universities to pursue your higher medical education, then you need to write certain tough examinations to get admission. UCAT is one of the examinations you need to clear to get medical admission and the exam pattern might seem to be different from that of the other. The exam has strict timings and so you need to make a lot of preparation before giving the real examination.
When you wanted to know how to prepare for this exam, it might always leave you with a tricky question of where to start and how to prioritize. Here in this article, we give you some tips for UCAT preparation and areas to focus on based on the sections to raise the confidence in you to give a shot at the test.
Before getting into the strategies to follow for each section, let us know the sections that are involved in the examination – verbal, decision making, quantitative, abstract reasoning, and situational judgment. These are the 5 sections that require more attention.
- Verbal reasoning – When you wanted to give the test, you will have roughly 30 sec to answer each question. So you might not expect to get answer to the query directly from the text and so make some interpretations. Here are some strategies to follow in this section:
- Use some keyword technique to gist the paragraph and get the content
- Search around the keyword
- Ensure to read the question and search for the keyword to get the answer from the paragraph
- Do not skip true or false query as they are easy to answer
- For knowing the author opinion, read the conclusion rather the entire paragraph
- Have a note on the negative queries
- Do not spend more time in getting the answer for single query – just make a logical guess and move on
- Work on skimming the novel or reading book during practice
When you find the same keyword many times, then choose the alternate keyword to get the suitable answer for the query.
- Decision making – Here you need to balance the type of question and here are some strategies to follow during the preparatory phase:
- Concentrate on your mistakes and do not repeat them
- Practice more on venn diagram
- Practice with exact timings
- Quantitative reasoning – This section is more like maths and so you might go with some logical reasoning and elimination:
- Practice onscreen calculator during the practice tests
- Do not depend too much on calculator
- Try guessing using mental maths
- Ensure to estimate the right answer and flag if required
- Do not forget to check the units
- Abstract reasoning – This analyzes your identifying patterns in abstract shapes and contains 55 questions. Here are some of the tips to follow:
- More than one rule can be used
- The same rule can sometime work for both sets
- Check your time and answer the query fast
- Situational judgement – This is the final section that analyzes your act on the real world scenarios and thus different from other exams. Here they give 22 scenarios and here are some of the tips:
- Think about your role while answering the query
- Remember points to be answered and straight to the query
- Give separate answer to the query
Conclusion
With the confusion of where to start and how to prepare for the examination, the above tips section-wise might help you to crack the score in the real UCAT exam.