Hi all
I had a request today regarding what materials I used and what I thought of them. It was supposed to be a private message, but I may as well stick it up on here.
Anyway, the main materials I had were:
Griffith's GAMSAT review
GAMSAT Guru
Des O'Neil
Lett's AS/2 Physics and chemistry books
Ozimed papers
Official ACER papers
Calculations in A level chemistry
Organic Chemistry for dummies
(Note, I'm a Genetics Grad so I have a strong basis in biology already)
I'll go through in order what I thought of each.
Griffith's GAMSAT review -
Wonderfully useful book. Teaches you how to go about the exam rather than content, although it is brilliant for section II. I got my highest mark in section II even though i've never written an essay like that in my life.
Definitely worth the money, buy online.
GAMSAT Guru
A shower of shite. I wouldn't line a budgie's cage with this stuff for fear the breath talking stupidity of the morons that wrote it might be contagious and make my budgie forget how to breathe. They miss out bits, have diagrams that are infinitely worse than I could produce on paint and in one book they replaced all the colons ( : ) with "x" ....how did that slip by them? The physics book is especially poor, being a good judge for that as I have very little physics background, they fail to explain topics on a regular basis and often pass them off as too easy for them to bother with. I opened an entire thread about this, if you want to know more, go find it. Basically, don't buy it....or buy it and burn it to lower the number in circulation. I basically gave mine away.
Des O'Neil
Pretty sure it contains all the info you need, although it'll take you a very long time to go through it all. To be fair to it, if it was a little more organised it'd be great. Goes into too much depth, but that's not really a problem. Not bad, but it's no textbook....
Letts AS/2 Physics / Chem
Useful, nice and simple and easy to use. However the revision based style of these means that you may need a bigger textbook at the later stages of A2 chem to fill in what you can't pick up. The sort of thing you might be able to pick up for £0.01 on amazon (plus £2.50 postage). Consider your local library for larger more in depth textbooks to fill in the gaps.
Ozimed papers
I had all 10, no complaints really. It's useful to be able to practice although i never actually sat down and did a full one all at once (as I was advised to). The difficulty of these seems to be placed at either a little too high or too low for the test itself.
Official ACER Papers
Naturally these are the most accurate, you can't really do without them, but try and get second hand.
Calculations in A level chemistry
Not a bad little book. It's the mathematical accompaniment of
chemguide: helping you to understand Chemistry - Main Menu (which is itself very useful - could stand in for text books with the Letts). No complaints really, just used it to fill in where I thought I needed to be able to do certain chemistry stuff in greater detail.
Organic chemistry for dummies
Very good, essential for all non chemists. Organic chemistry is a very big part of the test (in fact my GAMSAT didn't actually have any inorganic chem in it at all). I went for knowing nothing of organic chem to auditing one module and using this book and going into the exam as confident in it as I was in basic biology. I suggest you get this. I enjoyed it so much, that I'm not actually selling it along with the rest of my stuff
So yea, there you go.
Any questions?
Nik
