My thoughts on the UCAT and how I prepared
August marks a period of time where many people will be sitting their UCAT for admission to medicine.
It's probably best to start off with what the UCAT is. It’s a multiple choice aptitude test, that’s used for applying to medicine, dentistry and other health related degrees. It lasts for 2 hours and its made up of 5 sections:
Verbal reasoning - Reading a passage of text and answering some best answer questions
Decision making - Different puzzles that need to be solved
Quantitative reasoning - Basic maths questions
Abstract reasoning - Shapes and other weird patterns
Situational judgment - Picking the most appropriate response to scenarios that could happen in real life to assess if you’re a good person
I am going to talk about the UCAT for the medicine side of things. Let me air my grievances with the UCAT. Universities in the UK feel that if you are able to find a few words in a passage, match a few shapes and guess a vast majority of the exam correctly (because of the ridiculous time pressures) you possess the ability to provide care for an individual. This is absolutely absurd. The fact is the UCAT is not a measure of your ability to become a good doctor, it is purely a primitive method to make the admissions team at universities do less work. If you haven’t done well in the UCAT, it's not a reflection of your ability to study medicine. It’s just a stupid exam. I don't think I would feel comfortable with my doctor guessing my treatment, because they were too busy and needed to allocate their time elsewhere.
Let me give some perspective, I was applying this last year to a few management consulting companies. All of them required at least 3+ interviews and an aptitude test. Overall, the whole process would take 10 hours plus to deem you capable of sitting behind a computer as part of the company but nowhere near a client. Each interview required a “Case Study,” where you actually had a go at the sort of work you would do. The only thing that closely resembles that is the situational judgment section of the UCAT, that isn’t even taken into consideration by the majority of universities, and that after a 2 hour aptitude test and a 1-2 hours interview you are now deemed capable of studying a degree like medicine with the expectation that you will be responsible for patients... right.
My thoughts in a nutshell, achieving in the UCAT is not an indication that you will be a good doctor, which equally means if you don't do well, it doesn’t mean you aren’t cut out to be a doctor either. It’s just a process that doesn’t represent anything that makes others job easier.
But here is how I tackled the UCAT, and the resources I would recommend and others I would say stay away from.
Start early - Its true, you could cram for the UCAT in 2 weeks and possibly do well, but the more time you give yourself, you'll feel more confident with the process of the UCAT, its like learning to drive. I truly believe that most people become so demoralised when they start studying for it, that they never end up sitting the test.
Work smart - I did a tonne of questions and my score would never improve. Make mistakes, understand why you made it and when the question comes up again that's another mark in the bag. The solution to the UCAT is not blind practice. The brain wont suddenly be able to navigate through the test.
Set yourself up for success - Prep early, book at a slot you're comfortable with. Don't rush and don't cram it's not that kind of test. Equally, don't study for 6 months, theres more to life and to the medical school application than the UCAT, after all don't forget you still need to be a straight A student, captain of multiple sports teams, grade 8 in the xylophone, done 100 hours of work experience and had a life to be considered for an interview.
In terms of the material to prepare for it. I used the 1250 question book, which was great for learning to answer the questions but don't bother with the practice, while Medify is the perfect question bank. I also watched a few youtube videos of people answering questions.
A note on Medify -
Verbal reasoning - A LOT easier on Medify, if you're scoring 700 as I was, chances are you wont in the real thing so focus on verbal even if you're smashing it
Decision Making - Easier but not very far off the real thing
Quantitive - A lot harder on Medify, I was shocked because QR was always my worst section but the real thing was a lot easier. You might not even need to flag and skip any of these questions.
Abstract Reasoning - Medify has got this wrong in my opinion. It's far too hard. From scoring consistently in the low 600s sometimes even 500s I got 720 on the day in this section. I would have focussed more on VR which I was scoring 700 on medify.
I wanted to give myself the best chance for beating the UCAT. I tried Kaplan and I really cant express how useless I found the course and their question bank.. Just demoralising and not representative of the real thing at all... plus its expensive. Some people swear by it, but thats my opinion.
Preparing well and not becoming stressed or overwhelmed by the UCAT is the key, if you need some support with it reach out to me and I will be happy to help. Remember though this is not a test that reflects if you're capable of being a doctor, it's just something that you'll need to get out of the way.
