UKCAT for 2017 Entry to UK

Got my score today:

VR: 540 (bad surprise)
QR: 720 (good surprise)
AR: 680 (good surprise)

Average: 647

SJT: Band 3 (very disappointing- I got band 1 in all the practice tests I did)

Would this be good enough to apply for dentistry or no???

Please as I am very worried that I am not going to be accepted... thanks in advance D:

Well done. I had a look at Manchester dentistry and they say: "
We do not operate a cut-off score for UKCAT results. It is merely one element of the assessment of the application. Gaining a low UKCAT percentile score does not mean you will be automatically rejected. Similarly, a high UKCAT percentile score does not mean you will be successful, either."

So I guess you need to research how each school treats UKCAT in case some have minimum scores.

Alright then:

VR: 820
QR: 900
AR: 690
Band 2

Looks like I'm good for an interview at Warwick for graduate entry. Hopefully how well I got on with last year's cohort will count in my favour when it comes to the interview this time.

Hi

I am in a way sorry to hear that it is your third time. What were your scores in previous years?

By now, you should be au fait with the structure of the exam I take it. I too revised from the 1000Q book and found it useful to go at my own pace to make sure I understood what I was doing. Particularly useful for verbal, abstract and SJ where there is no point doing timed practice before you are well versed. Depending on how long you have to work every day, that should take you about 2 to 3 weeks anyway. Then in the rest of the time, I would suggest moving to online practice. Personally I used Medify, which was pretty good. And then finish by doing timed practice on the UKCAT website. It might be an idea to do one timed practice on the UKCAT website before you start your preparation anyway, just so you can get a benchmark. Earlier I wrote a detailed account of my experience and the tips I would suggest. I have requoted it below.

Alright then:

VR: 820
QR: 900
AR: 690
Band 2

Looks like I'm good for an interview at Warwick for graduate entry. Hopefully how well I got on with last year's cohort will count in my favour when it comes to the interview this time.

Hi guys

I took the exam yesterday and scored
VR: 890 - AR:750 - QR: 870 - SJT -Band 1
Used the Medify online bank and the 1000Q book by ISC Medical.
Thought I would share some of my methods:

VR
The 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 of
his questions as True/False. Given that the T/F questions tend to be easier I wonder how this is all calibrated.

QR
The 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 reasons:

(i) 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,

AR
AR 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
- Intersections

With 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.

SJT
When 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.

DM
Don't waste your time on that; it;s just an annoying distraction.

Hope this helps

Well done! How did you prepare for the VR questions which are not T/F/CT? And how long did you spend preparing?

anybody knows what similar between the sets

there are a plenty of free statement VR practice questions in the ISC1000Q book, and even more on Medify. try to treat them the same as T/F/CT questions, in terms of quickly identifying keyword(s) and scanning the text for relevant sections. I spent 3-4 weeks on both.

Could it be that Set A has an even number of shapes in each box and Set B has an odd number? (I haven't done this in a year so I'm a bit rusty on rules, sorry, so I'm not sure what you mean by similar between the sets I just remember the one where you have to fit a new one into one of the sets)

thanks, how many hours a day did you do? Would 7 a day be too much? do u mean 4 weeks all together or 8

i think i did probably 2-3h for 2 or 3 weeks, and a bit more in the last week. it depends on how much time you have til the exam and how much material you have to go through. for me i looked at the total medify practice questions and just divided it evenly over 2 weeks, and left my last week free to do one mock per day.

grats on the great score! did you get interviews last year but didn't get offers, if you dont mind me asking?