UKCAT and BMAT

[Daniel-Wilkins]

DrM you are probably right and it looks like another move toward American style SATs for university applicants...which i'm sure we'll have over here in the future. But the UKCAT is supposed to test innate skills which can't be revised, unlike A levels which my chemistry teacher calls 'stamp collecting' so if they actually get it right then it should work! At least, I hope so! I'm jut so glad that i'm applying now; not in a few years time!

[Rake]

I'm applying for one school that has no test (Queens), one requiring the BMAT (Oxford) and two asking for UKCAT (Aberdeen and Leeds).

It occurs to me that some Careers teachers are *cough* useless, and won't have heard about the exams. Their budding medics will apply with great grades and a sparkling PS but will be knocked out of the competition straight away because they don't have the exam.
If I were in a cynical mood I'd say that's lucky for us, because there are bound to be quite people getting caught that way, so we'll have slightly less competition than applicants in later years. After all, my careers teacher heard about them from me.

[Innocent_Angel]

Thing about the entrance exams is if you are genuinely intelligent you have nothing to worry about.

I applied to Oxford for Medicine and had to sit the BMAT and thought it was ridiculously difficult. I'd never sat an exam so cringe-worthy before. My results came back and I got a 5.8 which I was really impressed with considering how much I hated that exam. Still, my GCSEs weren't good enough for them to give me an interview but they said my BMAT score indicated I was a 'suitable candidate for medicine because I had the aptitude' as they put it.

What the beauty of the BMAT is, is that you can't revise for it. This means to get a good score on it, you genuinely have to be intelligent. The problem is because AAB at A Level is not really a problem for a lot of students to obtain, especially if you revise for months beforehand, universities need something else to discriminate upon before they start dishing out interviews.

This means when you get an interview, it will be much less competitive thanks to these admissions tests.

However, the down side is that the universities might interview candidates who did well on the BMAT/UKCAT but who do not have the necessary people skills, thereby conning you out of your interview.

So it works both ways.

My advice - if you want to do medicine, then don't let stupid aptitude tests put you off. If you don't try, you'll never get in. And even if you don't get in first time, if medicine is what you really want to do, there are other ways to do it.

Just interested, what were your GCSE results?