UCAT Test day Incident

Studied really hard for my UCAT and sat for the test as an international student yesterday. Somehow, after taking a breather for a short while after my quantitative reasoning section (~30 seconds), when I entered my abstract reasoning section after pressing the "OK" button to continue, was left with 5 minutes and 50 seconds to complete the entire section due to a glitch. I was surprised as I thought the timer for the next section would start when I pressed the "OK" button to see the first question. Raised the issue up after and the people at the test centre gave me a test incident number. Really disappointed as abstract was the section I studied the most for and it was way below the average for the rest of my other sections. To give some context, got 730 for VR, 730 for QR and 750 for DM but 550 for abstract and an average of 690. Dont know what theyll do tbh but still pretty gutted. I dont know if theyll help me adjust my score or indicate something to the unis i want to apply to

Reply 1

549

Original post by rohinn__

The timer is continuous from the second you start the test. That includes the 2 minutes reading of instructions at the beginning which introduces you to the test before you even read the 1 minute instructions before each subtest. It cannot be paused or restarted as soon as your test is activated. Even the test centre administrators cannot pause or restart the timer or subtest.

After each section, you have 1 minute reading time for the instructions before you begin the next subtest, that is the breathing time. It was not a glitch that the timer continued but it would be a glitch if the timer just jumped down 5 minutes if you did take a 30 second additional breather. There is a timer continuously going down in the back, whether you click OK or not. My computer froze and it was even shut down and restarted and my timer still continued to tick down when the test wasn't even on the screen. UCAT have said that the test itself is 120 minutes and without a break (normal UCAT test, not UCATSEN) so they've stated it's continuous and listed the breakdown of the timings on their website: https://www.ucat.ac.uk/about-ucat/test-format/

They will not adjust your score because they can't tell what you would've scored originally. For technical incidences beyond your control, they will usually add an annotation (or in rare cases, you can retake the UCAT and sit a different UCAT exam to the one you did): https://www.ucat.ac.uk/test-day/test-incident/
But on the website, as they've stated it's 120 minutes and continuous without break and this is written on the instructions when you sit your test (just before the verbal reasoning 1 minute reading instruction appears), I'm not sure what they'll do - see test incident link above. They can check how much time has been lost/inactive during the test itself, even when your computer is switched off (because it's a continuous timer) so they'll see that you've taken a longer break than the 1 minute allocated during the reading time between subtests instead of clicking OK immediately, and should also see the timer has jumped down.

If your screen froze/timer jumped, you should definitely flag to them and keep chasing them about it because if you took a 30 second breather, then you should only have removed 30 seconds of the 13 minutes allocated to AR subtest, unless your breather happened to be like 5 minutes long, which is a significant technical disruption but it'd be up to them to decide whether to give you retest opportunity. Some people have only had annotations added for lost time.

I'm still waiting to hear back about my UCAT test incident outcome and I sat it on the 17th Aug, screen froze twice, computers were switched off and I had to move workstations.

(edited 3 years ago)

Reply 2

Jacqui79

Original post by Ramesh1975

Hi my daughter hit with the same issue and she lost 15 minutes during her exams. Could you please let me know your outcomes. Did you mange to resit the test again. Thanks

My daughter had a technical issue on her online UCAT after many email and arguments she is allowed to resit the test tomorrow final day

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