UCAT

Sorry if this is a crass question, but has anyone done a UCAT mock, got 2190 and SJT band 2 ... and then gone on to achieve a decent score in their real thing?
We have 6 weeks to practise each day but are feeling downhearted at the low score now after a fair amount of work over the full year! (sort of looking for reassurance that this is possible please!)

Reply 1

aspiringgem

Original post by AnneKidd

Have you tried Medify? Lots of full mocks and individual timed and untimed sections/questions. It helped to get my score from around 2500 to 3180 in the real thing in around 4 weeks.

(edited 9 months ago)

Reply 2

Revadz99

Original post by aspiringgem

Have you tried Medify? Lots of full mocks and individual timed and untimed sections/questions. It helped to get my score from around 2500 to 3180 in the real thing in around 4 weeks.

What did you do to improve your score, like in detail. Thanks

Reply 3

Applewood_

I am in a similar situation. I am currently using medify and scoring 2280-2500 and band 1/2. I don't have that much time before my exam (3 weeks), how did you manage to improve your mark by so much?

Reply 4

aspiringgem

Original post by Applewood_

I am in a similar situation. I am currently using medify and scoring 2280-2500 and band 1/2. I don't have that much time before my exam (3 weeks), how did you manage to improve your mark by so much?

I think I did one full practice test under timed conditions every two days, then spent the rest of the time just focusing on the sections with the lowest score. Use the data that Medify gives you. For me that was VR and AR. QR & SJT were always my strong ones so I didn't do much practice there. And DM I was ok at but I found I couldn't really get much quicker.

For those sections, I did a lot of 10-15 min practice tests - the function on Medify where you can set how long you want to practise for and it will generate the right number of questions to match the timing in the exam.

Timing was always the issue for me - for VR I knew I'd only have time to accurately answer 7 or 8 out of the 11 sets, so the key thing was triaging which ones I was going to answer (e.g. the shorter passages, or the ones where I liked the subject more), and which ones I was going to have to bind-guess. For AR, I knew I just wouldn't be able to spot some patterns, so that was just having the discipline to flag and move on. I got very lucky in the real thing with AR and spotted all the patterns.

This only worked once I knew how to answer the questions themselves. There was a time where I just didn't get AR, so it took me a while to get to grips with it without being under timed conditions. This was helpful: https://www.medify.co.uk/blog/ucat-abstract-reasoning-tips#SCANS

I don't think I ever did more than 4 hours per day, and some days I did none... it's a fine balance of doing enough vs doing too much.

Reply 5

anitaaaaaaa

do you have any tips for VR? i'm struggling soo much on medify atm and i'm seeing people say it's easier than the real thing lol, how did you find it in the actual exam?

Reply 6

aspiringgem

Original post by anitaaaaaaa

do you have any tips for VR? i'm struggling soo much on medify atm and i'm seeing people say it's easier than the real thing lol, how did you find it in the actual exam?

I'd heard that as well, but the texts in my VR were even longer than Medify and I found the real thing horrible, pulled it back with the other sections. Hopefully you'll have more luck but be prepared not to!

Work out what the issue is - accuracy or timing. If the former do untimed practice to make sure you get the questions right, then move onto timed. I did a lot of short timed sessions on Medify to help with speed (e.g. 3 question sets in 6 minutes), aiming to fully answer 2 sets and educated-guess the other. Work out what technique works for you - I think I read the question first, then read the text up only up until I could answer the question, then moved onto the next question and repeat. Work out how many question sets you can realistically answer in the time and guess & flag the ones that are going to be more difficult/time consuming to make sure you get to the end of the test (the last set of four might be the easiest!)

Also... in the exam itself I panicked in this section and probably wasted a minute doing so, so try to keep a cool head and if you don't know something, flag, forget about it, do your best on the next questions/sections.