Did UKCAT last week. Totalled 2110 I think and averaged 700 across the three scored sections; best score was QR at 750 and scored band 2 on SJ. The week before the test, I completely took my foot off the gas and can honestly say I didn't put 100% in as I was hoping to apply for foundation medicine at Durham; which no longer exists as this year will be the final intake. I still decided to take the test though as I'd already booked it and wanted to see what it was like after months of preparation!
Bit of advice here if anyone is interested. Just a little background info, when I first started UKCAT practicing I was awful and was scoring a guesstimate 400-500 on all of the mocks I could find in November. I practiced approximately 2-4 hours a week from January until a month out, then upped it to about 12 a week including mocks. The last week, as I mentioned, was on and off as I knew I wouldn't be studying medicine after all.
Sources used:
- ISC Medical 600 questions book (very good, questions mostly harder than the real thing which is good)
- ISC Medical 1000 questions book (bought this when it was released however a lot of the questions are repeated from the 600 edition, however, still a very good resource)
- Kaplan free mock and practice questions
- How to master the UKCAT (decent resource, bit dated now but extra questions came in handy at a later date in my revision)
- Medify for 2 weeks (highly recommended as the interface is extremely similar)
- UKCAT official site questions
- Any AR and GCSE maths questions I could find on the net
Thoughts on the actual test:
VR - I hardly had any true/false/CT questions, most were sentences asking what could be inferred from the passage etc. I would recommend you use an up to date resource to practice these types as I thought the T/F/CT questions were easy to speed read and not worth revising as much as the other subtypes. Overall I found this section harder than revision for this reason and I'm better at English than maths! Practice speed reading whenever you can.
QR - Easier than revision, had some very basic questions thrown in with some harder ones. The best advice I can give anyone for this section is to practice using the keyboard calculator, shortcuts and page down function as it saved me a hell of a lot of time during the real test being able to switch between keyboard and whiteboard and is far better than having to use the mouse and notepad. Practice this technique, I'm glad I did. 5 questions I would say were tricky to the point I guessed due to time reasons. I actually thought the calculator was worse than the Medify one and disappears when you press next.
AR - probably similar to revision, most the patterns were recognisable. This was by far my worst section when I started and I was doing extremely bad in the mocks. I think the key is to use a variety of sources for this area as every resource seems to have their own little trends and common themes. I had to guess my last 5 or so which I was disappointed with. Best advice I can give is to resist looking at the test shape until you've found the pattern.
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