How to Prepare for UCAT During The Lockdown?
The first step is to get familiar with the style of questions which are in the UCAT. UCAT consists of 5 sections including, Quantitative reasoning (assessing your numerical skills and your ability to interpret graphs/tables/charts), Verbal reasoning (assessing your ability to solve words based problems), Abstract reasoning (judging your ability to decipher and interpret patterns), and Situational Judgment and Decision making (testing your ability to make considerate ethical and moral judgements). Getting your head round the different questions styles is critical, and will allow you to score the highest marks. One way of doing this is revising the same ‘section-style’ questions in the same block. By doing blocks of the same questions you slowly build on question specific skills, and begin to get a better understanding of the way questions are worded/answered.
Another really useful tip is to spend some time at the end of doing a question block, to carefully analyse your answers; both the ones you got right and wrong. It’s useful to see which questions you got right, but it’s even more important for the ones you didn’t get right, this is where I think I improved most during my revision (I got 725, 2018). This analysis will also help you to understand what the underlying problem was, did you misunderstand the question? Did you misread the question? Did you accidentally click the wrong answer? Whatever the reason may be, it is critical to go over it, and to learn from it. Making mistakes is the best way to learn, and the best way to ensure you won’t make these mistakes in the actual test. It may also be useful to go through a block of questions, and get a friend to do it too. Then you can go over the questions together at the end, learning from your mistakes, and your friends. Seeing a different prospective for how someone tackles questions can also be really useful.
Doing practice questions is one of the most beneficial ways to improve your UCAT score. I would also attend a day course, and I would recommend the Blue Peanut UCAT course for this. There is now a webinar option so you can get live training at home. It is so much easier for someone to teach you how to approach the exam rather than have to do it yourself and end up getting stuck. There also many hard copy books which have questions in - these are also beneficial to get to grips with the style of questions and to improve your scores, but beware of outdated and irrelevant questions. However it’s better to use hard copy, book questions earlier in your studying timeline, and don’t forget the online question bank that comes with the Blue Peanut UCAT course. Unlike the books, this is constantly being revised and is at a level slightly higher than UCAT. This will help you to get more familiar with the online style of questions for your actual test. The transition from book questions, to online questions can sometimes be a little more difficult.
Best of luck for your exams!
