The Official Cambridge Applicants Thread 2016 Entry MK II

Yeah, weird little anecdote about that question.. I was doing the June 10 F212 past paper this afternoon, and I decided to skip over all of the long questions, because of course OCR wouldn't REPEAT a 7 marker.. And guess what was repeated? The antibody question! Word for word, same marks and everything!!!! I actually started laughing when I saw the question Sucks that I didn't have the mark scheme answer fresh in my mind, but oh well, it was easy anyway!

Silly OCR
Constant region, variable region, hinge region right?

Yeeeep! Overall I think it was one of the nicest papers ever!
Ugh except for the silly biodiversity, but it's my fault for not memorizing it :/
Have you got F322 tomorrow?

Yep agreed, biodiversity was weird as per . Problem is, grade boundaries will be probably be really high this year so 100 may be like 89/90? Don't think I got 100 if that's the case but should be fine still. Where do you reckon about grade boundaries?

Yeeeep! Overall I think it was one of the nicest papers ever!
Ugh except for the silly biodiversity, but it's my fault for not memorizing it :/
Have you got F322 tomorrow?

Yep agreed, biodiversity was weird as per . Problem is, grade boundaries will be probably be really high this year so 100 may be like 89/90? Don't think I got 100 if that's the case but should be fine still. Where do you reckon about grade boundaries?

Hmm 90 is pretty unlikely (highest ever = 91 and second highest = 85). That said, this paper was pretty easy so I'd say 87/88 for full UMS on this one.

On a completely unrelated note, have you booked your UKCAT yet? I've just gone ahead and shelled out £65 (total rip-off ) and booked for late July. I'm worried it's now going to come around far too soon though...

Nope, got AQA chemistry. UMS boundaries are ridiculously high (as literally EVERY PAPER IS THE SAME), it's just a question of how to make the least mistakes.
Nevertheless, just nailed my last past paper so going to relax for the rest of the evening now

Hmm 90 is pretty unlikely (highest ever = 91 and second highest = 85). That said, this paper was pretty easy so I'd say 87/88 for full UMS on this one.

On a completely unrelated note, have you booked your UKCAT yet? I've just gone ahead and shelled out £65 (total rip-off ) and booked for late July. I'm worried it's now going to come around far too soon though...

Hmm 90 is pretty unlikely (highest ever = 91 and second highest = 85). That said, this paper was pretty easy so I'd say 87/88 for full UMS on this one.

On a completely unrelated note, have you booked your UKCAT yet? I've just gone ahead and shelled out £65 (total rip-off ) and booked for late July. I'm worried it's now going to come around far too soon though..

Hmm, I'm awful at guessing grade boundaries but I would probably want to agree with you.. However a quick calc puts the average full UMS boundary at 81.6 (its only been 91 once!) so possibly more around high 80s? I hope it's low-ish though, as I'm pretty sure I've dropped around 4-5 for certain marks, and then my handwriting is practically illegible so...

Hmm 90 is pretty unlikely (highest ever = 91 and second highest = 85). That said, this paper was pretty easy so I'd say 87/88 for full UMS on this one.

On a completely unrelated note, have you booked your UKCAT yet? I've just gone ahead and shelled out £65 (total rip-off ) and booked for late July. I'm worried it's now going to come around far too soon though...

Yeh I'm really hoping that it's not another freak year like a 90 odd or something but yeh high 80s seems likely, should be alright though. The mark scheme will always catch us out somewhere, especially in biodiversity but it should affect everyone equally. Dw mine is illegible aswell... It's honestly a miracle how they managed to read my essays at GCSE.

Ugh same haha.. I do wonder sometimes how many marks I lose just because the examiner can't read my exorbitant dumpings of key words

I've booked my UKCAT for the 1st of September- Do you reckon that's too late? Idk, I feel like it's quite late :/

Nah I've only booked mine so early because I'm abroad in August and don't want it hanging over me during the holidays As long as you give yourself a good 20 hours to prepare you'll be fine

Sorry for the ignorant question but how does the UKCAT work with different test days? Is is basically a different set of questions for different dates, and then candidates receive their scale score?

Don't worry, it's not an ignorant question at all! The way I've been told that it happens is that it's the same test for all candidates on all test days (otherwise it would be really difficult to scale). The candidate receives their score on a printout the moment they finish the test. Because you can only ever spend a short amount of time on a single question, my guess is that most candidates forget the question content and thus little 'cheating' occurs in terms of candidates telling each other what questions will come up.
Also, there's something like 50 different days you can do the test on so I doubt they made a different set of questions for every single one!