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UKCAT Help - MEDICINE 2015 ENTRY

Now I know some of you have probably been stressing about the UKCAT seen as the majority of unis in the country rely on your separate subtest scores or overall average when deciding whether to give you an interview, offer etc. However, after all my stressing and various breakdowns throughout the summer before my UKCAT, I've decided to pass on all my knowledge to you all.

Firstly, DO NOT STRESS! I think now that I have experienced the whole UKCAT stress, I feel like it is slightly overexaggerated with all the horror stories and rare exceptional scores that everyone hears about it.

I would suggest that you bookn your UKCAT for during the summer holiday definitely after results day. This is obviously helpful because from your results you can tell whether you still want to pursue medicine or whether you even can pursue it straight. Secondly, although some people detest the idea of having to revise during the summer, it's really helpful because you can never really stop revising from exams (obviously greatly reduced) and it's also better because attempting to revise during one of the most important academic years in your life is crazy difficult. Teachers won't prioritise you and it's doubtful your school will allow you to take time off, so truly summer is the best time to complete it.

Depending on your character, you can still go out and be social as long as you ensure you complete at least two hours of revision everyday. I myself took various days off revision and was working part-time during revision but just made sure I compensated for it on the days I did spend to do revision. On one day, I did about 500 practise questions just to compensate for taking a day and a bit off.

Often people ask when to start revising, I think as long as you have about 5/6 weeks of revision for at least 2/3 hours per day, you will be fine. Like I said before these can be spaced out as long as you have some intense revision for the last 8/9 days before your exam. However, I strongly suggest to let loose a little and not go too ham with revision as this can greatly affect your performance; breaks and days off are important.

Lastly, revison material.
DO NOT REVISE FROM UKCAT BOOKS!
The UKCAT is a computerised exam with an online calculator so it is truely a waste of time. I find that the people who revise from books often have to spend at least twice as much time revising to get used to the conditions. A computer programme I swear by is MEDIFY. You go online and create and account for a reasonable price and it provides you with a ridiculous amount of practice questions, 3 mocks at different levels of difficulty and it's recently introduced a series of timed questions. I used this every single day and it really helps as it shows you an analysis of your ability in different types of questions and tells you how many questions you have attempted per day.

This programme saved my life and is the only form of revision I would recommend to anyone as it has been created to portray exactly what the UKCAT is like, calculator and all. If you can succeed on Medify then you can acheive a great UKCAT score. I did the easy mock after I had done a lot of revision just to assess my progress, the medium mock a few days before the exam and the hard mock on the day of the exam to prepare me. I suggest to only atempt the mocks in the last 10 days before the exam as they can only be attempted once.

My UKCAT went amazing thanks to Medify, my highest score was 780 in Abstract Reasoning and my lowest score was 620 in Verbal Reasoning; I got 685 as an average overall and I am extremely happy.

Hope my post has helped;
GOOD LUCK!