Has anybody used the Gamsat Guru mehod?

[KazB]

Hi guys,

Could someone please please help me out with what to do about the GAMSAT. I want to sit it in January but haven't studied any science since GCSE's (1994). I have been trawling the web adn all the forums and am now more confused than ever. I'd love to do Gradmed but it's too expensive for me and DRprep looks too short to be very useful. Should I buy GAMSAT Guru or Des O'Neill (strange gameshow name) or GAMSATreview? The fact is I am only doing it coz of St George's which isn't even my first or second choice. Does anyone know if you have to do GAMSAT for Newcastle?

Anyway any advice would be welcome and if anyone is in a similar situation to me in London then it would be great to speak/meet with you as I feel a bit isolated at the mo. If someone has one set of revision stuff then maybe I could buy another type and we could pool resources.

I eagerly await your responses.

Thanks

[exms]

Originally Posted by KazB

I'd love to do Gradmed but it's too expensive for me and DRprep looks too short to be very useful. Should I buy GAMSAT Guru or Des O'Neill (strange gameshow name) or GAMSATreview?

I passed GAMSAT without doing any of these courses: you can just get yourself an A-level Chem text book and start reading. I was taking A-level Chem / AS Bio at the same time, which I think was very helpful. There's also a lot of publicly available advice on the talk-gamsat group mentioned in this thread.

Originally Posted by KazB

The fact is I am only doing it coz of St George's which isn't even my first or second choice. Does anyone know if you have to do GAMSAT for Newcastle?

No you don't. But, without trying to be offensive, you are really wasting your time applying if you don't know what each uni's requirements are. Read their prospectuses!

-- A.

[LizHill]

Hi Exms,

I'm applying to Swansea for 2006 entry. Any tips on the application would be fab. Im pretty clued up on the UCAS form and what I need to do for the Gamsat, but I have no idea what type of questions to expect in the interview and how best to prepare for it. Although interviews are a long way off I saw that you are at Swansea and so thought I would ask.

Thanks!

[stevejones2]

Have been following the forum for a while and had to respond to the above.

I have purchased a number of materials from Des O'Neil , the above Gamsat Guru! and others.

Without doubt the Gamsat Guru is the worst of these. It is basically full of type errors, mistakes in theory (I am a chem Grad) and in my opinion of little value. It will be winging its way back to Mr Lim to see if he sticks to his refund policy.

As quoted above there seem to be a lot of people who view selling any second rate materials as money for nothing.

Obviously these are only my opinions.

[exms]

Originally Posted by LizHill

I'm applying to Swansea for 2006 entry. Any tips on the application would be fab. Im pretty clued up on the UCAS form and what I need to do for the Gamsat, but I have no idea what type of questions to expect in the interview and how best to prepare for it. Although interviews are a long way off I saw that you are at Swansea and so thought I would ask.

Liz, you might want to re-post this question on the Swansea forum - there's a whole bunch of new first years who hopefully still glance at it from time to time. A quick answer though, is that when I did it, the interview at Swansea didn't seemed particularly fixed in terms of questions and the questions seemed more an attempt to get to know you as a person than to try to catch you out.

HTH

-- A.

[ChrisLim]

Originally Posted by stevejones2

Have been following the forum for a while and had to respond to the above.

I have purchased a number of materials from Des O'Neil , the above Gamsat Guru! and others.

Without doubt the Gamsat Guru is the worst of these. It is basically full of type errors, mistakes in theory (I am a chem Grad) and in my opinion of little value. It will be winging its way back to Mr Lim to see if he sticks to his refund policy.

As quoted above there seem to be a lot of people who view selling any second rate materials as money for nothing.

Obviously these are only my opinions.

Hi SteveJones2,

That is a serious allegation that you level, I am compelled to respond here.

1) You joined on the 25/09 and you have only one post and that is to rubbish the GAMSAT Guru on the day you join.

2) You say that you have purchased the product and that you are returning or have returned it, please substantiate those claims, I have no record of any steve jones who bought the GG. Every returnee has volunteered to me very constructive feedback on the reasons for the return. None have even remotely described it as "rubbish" as you have. I honour every return religiously, or else I would be very quickly out of business.

3) If you truly have bought the manuals and returned it, I would be delighted to hear and learn from what you have to say in more detail. Afterall, most of the improvements this edition were a result of suggestions from GAMSAT Guru users last year.

I think it's only fair that I ask you to substantiate your claims of having bought and returned the GG manuals because it is very easy to anonymously thrash something on the internet.

[stevejones2]

Dear Mr Lim

I do not wish to get into a slanging match. However I will pick a small selection of errors from one of the books.

General Chemsitry page 58

The poorly photocopied graphs you give are all incorrect. The distribution should not be symmetrical as shown in D it should be non-bell shaped in nature.

General Chemistry pages - 35,38,39,116,128,131,147,159,168,169,175 (to pick but a few) - superscript/subscript not correctly used - this seems to be a general theme and there are as I sure you know a great many more such errors. It might be an idae to proofread.

Pages 53,85,109 - poorly scanned diagrams from text books almost impossible to read.



Page 118 - Q6 Conjugate acid of stated acid is none of the answers

These are obviously only a few examples from one of the books.


Again these are only my observations and I hope the above will prove of some help.

SJ

[ChrisLim]

Originally Posted by stevejones2

Dear Mr Lim

General Chemsitry page 58

The poorly photocopied graphs you give are all incorrect. The distribution should not be symmetrical as shown in D it should be non-bell shaped in nature.

The diagrams given in options A, B and C are deliberately incorrect, as they are WRONG answers in the multiple choice. D which is the right answer is not a bell curve but is a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. The graph clearly shows the curve has a peak around the center and a long tail to the right of the graph (i.e. toward increasing speed).

Originally Posted by stevejones2

Page 118 - Q6 Conjugate acid of stated acid is none of the answers

Q6 is a replication from Q5, as you will see, both questions are the same, this is a duplication error.

Originally Posted by stevejones2

T35,38,39,116,128,131,147,159,168,169,175 (to pick but a few) - superscript/subscript not correctly used - this seems to be a general theme and there are as I sure you know a great many more such errors. It might be an idae to proofread.

Pages 53,85,109 - poorly scanned diagrams from text books almost impossible to read.

To address your points, since you have not pointed this out, one of the most embarassing errors in the manuals is that somehow during the printing of the Physics Manual, all the ":"(colon) signs have been replaced by a X(Capital x), we discovered this after the sets were already printed, so that is very embarassing.

The mistakes should not have happened, and typing errors and minor mistakes will be corrected in the next publishing run. There is no excuses for them, when you are writing over 800 pages of material, you try to keep mistakes to a minimum, obviously we didn't catch them all.

I am relieved that your dissappointment in the manuals were confined to typing errors and graphs that are a bit faint. Those things are easily fixed.

Now if you had said the topics and material covered in the manuals did not correspond to the topics examined in the GAMSAT.

Or that the GAMSAT questions in the manuals were not realistic to the real GAMSAT.

Or that after studying from the manuals, it did not give you an excellent preparation for the GAMSAT.

Or even that the outlined study method was the wrong way to approach the GAMSAT, that the manuals were not a good way to prepare for the GAMSAT, well those kind of criticisms I would be extremely concerned about.

With respect to those typical concerns I listed above regarding the GG manuals, there has been nothing but positive feedback from both past and current candidates.

As such, there is no excuses for the typing errors and I will have 8 manuals gone over with a fine tooth comb so as many of the typing errors will be corrected in the next print run.

[stevejones2]

Dear Mr Lim

I am glad you consider such an array of simple errors trivial.

As someone who edits academic texts for a living I can assure you your work would certainly not reach any publication standard.

The errors I noted are very simply the ones I had chance to find in 2-3 minutes looking at a single book. As you will be aware these are simply the tip of a much larger iceberg. As well as the general poor quality of presentation (photocopying pages from others work and including this your in your own for example), I also disagree with the analyisis that the work is a good presentation of theory.

It only remains for others who have the misfortune (in my opinion) to purchase your publication to make their own comments.

SG

[vafritia]

Hey Sunit!
I see you've been overwhelmed by requests to join your study group, but in case there's space for 2 more people, my friend, Felicity and I (both taking the gamsat in Jan 06) would like to join. I'm a UCL graduate and still live nearby, so for us even location-wise astudy group like your would be a great idea. We were about to order the gamsat guru stuff today (and split the cost), but if you guys have already bought them (or are buying them soon), perhaps we can share the cost with you guys and photocopy them from you.
Hope to hear from you soon!