UKCAT - GEM applicants 2012.

[zed.a1]

Hey guys, I just sat the UKCAT got a 730 avg...cannot believe it. So chuffed.

However, does anyone know of GEM unis (other than Imperial) that have a minimum score per section on the UKCAT. VR didn't go so well. My break down is:

VR- 560
QR- 720
AR- 820
DA- 820

I have no idea what happened in VR, it was my best section when practising. What baffles me more is that I was epically failing most QR sections in practice tests and I'm generally hopeless at maths. Oh well. I'm hoping my poor performance in VR won't let me down! If anyone has any info, it would be much appreciated! Thank you!

Well done, what materials did you use? Do you have any advice on how to tackle the sections? I think I've just seen your tweet on the GetIntoMedicine Twitter page.

[Puggy]

haha yep that's me tweeting!!!

Well I sat the UKCAT last year and got 645, mainly because I didn't prepare and use the materials properly.
I used 600q, acemedicine and went on the 2 day Kaplan course. I found it useful, despite my score.
This year I used Medify, Emedica and a few kaplan practice papers that someone who was also on the Kaplan course sent me last year. I can forward them on if you like.

My best advice would to be to flag hard questions for review, make an educated guess.

Last year I got 540 in QR because I got caught up on the hard, lengthy questions rather than triaging them. This year I pretty much guessed all hard questions and moved on to answer the easy ones and got 720! Who would have thought?!

Just keep doing practice questions. But make sure it's under timed conditions. You might get full marks under non timed conditions, but the main problem in the UKCAT is the time pressure. You need to be able to maximise your marks, so triage questions that are going to take up a lot of time.
At the end of the day, all questions are worth the same marks, in the time it could take you to answer a hard question you could have answered more easy questions, which maximises your mark...

Hope that makes sense, that's the strategy I used this year and it paid off (bar VR)!

[Fatima1]

Hi!

Sorry for my absence, I was on holiday. I got 720 in the UKCAT which I am very happy with.

I achieved this primarily with the 600Q book, revising over a period of about 2.5 months. My revision during this period was sometimes brilliant and other times not so much. Generally my biggest advice based upon my experience would be:

1. Work through the 600Q book steadily
2. The numerical section on the day is pretty ok, along with AR and DA. If you've done some practice and TRY TO KEEP A COOL HEAD COME TEST DAY - you should be ok
3. Please read newspaper articles with speed and get someone to test you on them. This should in my opinion help greatly. Because the amount you have to read in the VR section far exceeded what I had in any of the official practise tests. If I could go back this is what I would change about my preparation
4. I definitely agree with others who say: don't dither about. Just click on your answer and move on

That's all the advice I have for now to be honest.

I'm really interested in the course at SGUL, well I'm in love with it actually. So I'm hoping I do well enough in the GAMSAT to score an interview. So far I'm finding the chemistry challenging, if anybody has any advice please message me.