UKCAT for 2017 Entry to UK

Aww thank you for the kind words and advice, my trouble is I've only just started practising AR but I don't have a technique yet and I start stressing so end up clicking one of the options without recognising any patterns due to the limited time we have :/*
I find all the patterns really hard to identify anyway

yes, it should be ok seeing as the score floats around the 560-80 mark the past couple of years, fingers crossed we dont have too many strong linguists this year ^^. how are you feeling about your scores and the schools youd like to apply to?

Aww thank you for the kind words and advice, my trouble is I've only just started practising AR but I don't have a technique yet and I start stressing so end up clicking one of the options without recognising any patterns due to the limited time we have :/*
I find all the patterns really hard to identify anyway

me too at the beginning! it was especially stressful hearing people say 'its one of those things you either get or you dont.' i couldnt find most of the patterns at the start, but after practicing (ISC1000Q and Medify) they just came to me. the trick is to develop a technique to systematically go through possible patterns one by one (like SCANS). in time youll have seen enough to know quickly what kinds of patterns to look for.

Don't try to do AR in a timed fashion yet. Get an idea of the different things you need to look at. You will soon find that it becomes always a bit the same thing. No point doing Masterchef before you've learnt to cook!

Old ISC book with 600 questions in very cheap, around £6,

Hi I am resitting ukcat for the third time and have my test in exac 4 weeks and have not yet strted any prep. could someone pls tell me whether i have enought time and how to go about prep? i have the 1000 book .. thanks

Hi guysI took the exam yesterday and scoredVR: 890 - AR:750 - QR: 870 - SJT -Band 1Used the Medify online bank and the 1000Q book by ISC Medical.Thought I would share some of my methods:VRThe texts in the exam seem to have about 300-350 words and so you can't possibly read all of that properly in detail and answer questions as well unless you learn to read fast. When I prepared I tried both methods :Method 1 - Read the text properly and then go to the questions, but then I found that reading the text without knowing what I was looking for was a bit of a challenge because you are never quite sure as to what you are supposed to remember. The key I think is to be able to process the information as you go through the text and in that sense it make total sense to read the questions first. See Method 2 below, which I ended up using in the end.Method 2 - Reading the questions first gave me an idea of they type of thing I needed to look for in the text. So when I prepared and also at the exam yesterday, whenever a new text appeared I used the Next button to see all the questions for that text before pressing the Previous button to go back to the first question. That way, when I read the text I could see more quickly what sections were pretty much irrelevant and which ones mattered.In terms of balance of questions, all texts pretty much had the same lengths and the ration of True/False v. wordy questions was about 1/3 True/False. 2/3 wordy. However I do know that one of my neighbours in the centre was complaining that he had no True/False at all, whilst the guy on the other side nearly had half ofhis questions as True/False. Given that the T/F questions tend to be easier I wonder how this is all calibrated.QRThe issue with QR is timing but I'm sure I am not telling you anything new here. And the trick is to try and avoid using the calculator unless you really have to. I know that some of the college friends end up using a calculator to compute 15x3 + 2.3 x 0 + 3x2.2, but obviously you can waste 10 seconds doing that. The calculator is pretty stable but doing it with the mouse is awkward.Difficulty wise, I had a mix of questions. Some really easy stuff (e.g. add up two numbers from a table), but also some pretty complex stuff. The complex stuff was complex for several reasonsi) either it meant having to sift through long tables to find the correct information(ii) or it meant several stages of calculation. The challenge for those is that the calculator does not allow you to store much in memory so you have to make sure you write your intermediary calcs on the whiteboard.Some of the hard questions took me 50 seconds whilst the easier ones took maybe 10 second. In the end i finished the QR section with 2 minutes spare,ARAR was a real problem for me during the revision because I found it so hard at first was nearly in tears. I first did a few on the official website and got stuck for nearly 10 minutes on something that ended up being a fairly simple relationship. So what I did, instead of persevering with timed practice was to learn what I should be looking for so that I could spot it more quickly. That took a bit of time because for this one you really have to find your own way of thinking. But in the end you realise there are only so many things you need to look for e.g.:- Absolute/Relative position of objects- Absolute/Relative size of objects- Number of objects/sides/angles- Colour- Rotations / symmetries- IntersectionsWith that you cover 90% of the issues.But nothing will prepare you for it other than practice and getting used to patterns. Don't worry if it's a struggle to start with. It does get easier.SJTWhen you prepare for SJTs (and here again practice is key) you quickly realise it's always the same. There are questions about colleagues who are bad team players, who cheat, who say inappropriate things, etc. And in the end you kinda get bored with it. In the same that the questions are always the same, the answers are also always the same. So I would say the key for good preparation is to make sure that you understand the principles behind the answers before you do any practice. In that sense there is little value in doing timed practice for SJTs until you have understood why the answer is what it is. The way I did it is go through the official UKCAT questions and the ISC 1000Q book one by one and make sure I understood why the answer was what it was. Then when I did the mock exams I got nearly 100% questions right.DMDon't waste your time on that; it;s just an annoying distraction.Hope this helps

Hi I am resitting ukcat for the third time and have my test in exac 4 weeks and have not yet strted any prep. could someone pls tell me whether i have enought time and how to go about prep? i have the 1000 book .. thanks

Yeah that's true hopefully i develop some sort of technique either way! Thanks for the reassurance, also how were you doing on the practise sessions on medify?*

I am beginner like you and I am also taking UKCAT and BMAT and I am confused but reading from all the post above, I am going to invest in some book not sure which one I will buy. I will invest some online courses rather than going on a course. My school offer lots of support anytime I stuck Alex comes to rescue!!!!!

Thanks for that. my scores were both in the low 600's. how many total hours prep did u do? and did you do all the questions on medify? also, how did you approach the wordy vr questions (not the true false ct ones)?appreci8 the help, thanx

Do you know what is weird though. It is not just an average of 577. They in fact use three sets of questions which they distribute at random. The table below shows the results for each of the sets, which I have taken from the official report. For VR in 2015 there was nearly a .7 difference in the average number of questions on which people scored correctly. Form 1 was the worst for VR. This does not seem very fair. You would think they would have tested all three forms before to ensure closer results.



Right now I am sitting here wondering whether I can be bothered to sit the BMAT in November. I am not sure I am cut out for the high brow universities. And I am already going to spend most of the summer doing work placements, the personal statement and thinking interviews. I am not sure I want to revise more biology and physics as well. Plus the exam is in November I think and so I would need to gamble as whether I actually do well at the BMAT and given my current level of motivation at the moment, all indications are that i will probably not do as well as I should. So, my focus is currently on UKCAT universities such as Kings, Bristol, Edinburgh and Hull/York. Not sure yet . I wanted Leeds too but they have switched to BMAT so that kind blew that one out of the water. The other problem is that you only have one personal statement and so I have to make sure I choose med schools which are looking for a similar type of statement. No point applying for Kings (who seem to be more academic) and Bristol (where they are more touchy feely) because they will be looking for different things and my statement cannot be one-size-fits-all. I am also toying with the idea of St Georges' because they don't look at the personal statement and that may be a good alternative to Hull York. I guess I need to do some more research.

I am beginner like you and I am also taking UKCAT and BMAT and I am confused but reading from all the post above, I am going to invest in some book not sure which one I will buy. I will invest some online courses rather than going on a course. My school offer lots of support anytime I'm stuck, Alex comes to rescue!!!!!

i thought you averaged 700 something in your ukcat? is it a BM5 program youre applying for? i thought a score like that would guarantee interviews at most unis, and that a lot of them dont care very much about personal statements?

I did but that is no reason to produce a mediocre statement. Having talked to admission tutors I am getting the picture that they tweak their recruitment process every year and some of them drastically change. To give you an idea, Sheffield took people with UKCAT as low as 500 and not it's more like 750. Some care about personal statements, others don't. In the end the best policy is to do everything as thoroughly as possible so as to avoid any surprises.

I am not really sure why you recommend the 600Q book when you said yourself it was out of date. It doesn't matter if if's cheap if that means revising from an out of date book. Surely it is better to revise from the new version which has 1000Q all up to date no? Or am I missing something here?

not sure if TSR community rule will allow me to post a link here. but you can google it. website is truly non promotional, I think it has something to do with the official UKCAT listings.