UCAT preparation
What strategy helped you improve your UCAT score the most?
Which UCAT section did you find the hardest and how did you improve at it?
What is one mistake students often make when preparing for the UCAT?
Which UCAT section did you find the hardest and how did you improve at it?
What is one mistake students often make when preparing for the UCAT?
Reply 1
2
Original post
by Meet.Ash3131What strategy helped you improve your UCAT score the most?
Which UCAT section did you find the hardest and how did you improve at it?
What is one mistake students often make when preparing for the UCAT?
Which UCAT section did you find the hardest and how did you improve at it?
What is one mistake students often make when preparing for the UCAT?
Hi, just bumping this as I’m doing a school project about medical school entry and would really appreciate any advice!
Original post
by Meet.Ash3131What strategy helped you improve your UCAT score the most?
Which UCAT section did you find the hardest and how did you improve at it?
What is one mistake students often make when preparing for the UCAT?
Which UCAT section did you find the hardest and how did you improve at it?
What is one mistake students often make when preparing for the UCAT?
1. Doing little but consistent practice every day.
2. Quantitative reasoning (struggled with the speed). I improved by doing little but consistent practice each day (and familiarising myself with the calculator keyboard shortcuts)
3. Overpreparing. You can essentially burn out from too much practice, and then your performance drops. Many people start prepping months and months in advance and dedicate hours and hour every day to it, and it's just not beneficial to adopt this sort of strategy.
Reply 3
Original post
by Scotland Yard1. Doing little but consistent practice every day.
2. Quantitative reasoning (struggled with the speed). I improved by doing little but consistent practice each day (and familiarising myself with the calculator keyboard shortcuts)
3. Overpreparing. You can essentially burn out from too much practice, and then your performance drops. Many people start prepping months and months in advance and dedicate hours and hour every day to it, and it's just not beneficial to adopt this sort of strategy.
2. Quantitative reasoning (struggled with the speed). I improved by doing little but consistent practice each day (and familiarising myself with the calculator keyboard shortcuts)
3. Overpreparing. You can essentially burn out from too much practice, and then your performance drops. Many people start prepping months and months in advance and dedicate hours and hour every day to it, and it's just not beneficial to adopt this sort of strategy.
Yeah I agree with this - the UCAT is not a knowledge test, it's closer to an IQ test so I'd be surprised if scores improved super drastically from the beginning to final test day (by that I mean going from 1600 to 2300 or similar). Yes, getting used to the style of question, keyboard shortcuts, and the speed of the exam are going to help (they definitely helped me!) but I think people get too caught up in trying to spend months to prepare then getting demoralised when they dont see an insane improval rate in their results. but for my actual answer to these:
1) Being strict when timing myself and completing practice questions on a computer if you have one- more similar to the final exam
2)I found quantitative reasoning the hardest - just got used to the kinds of questions they asked and how to quickly answer them + keyboard shortcuts
3) Starting to prepare months and months and ignoring your actual exams, I'm scottish so maybe this is different but here, youre preparing for your Highers to sit in May, then most people sit the UCAT in August, so some people dont prepare enough fro their highers and dont do well enough to even apply in the first place!
Reply 4
12
Most people seem to reach a plateau and can the start to decline - I would say after the equivalent of about 3 weeks full time study (so after a few months if you do a couple of hours a day).
Definitely don’t study it at the expense of your exams - your grades are vital too. For this reason I would also book the test before you go back to school/college in the autumn. Definitely don’t book in the last week as if you are ill on the day you won’t be able to rebook (you are expected to rebook if you are ill - by taking the test you declare you are fit and there is no adjustment for extenuating circumstances).
If you get a low score, don’t bother applying to medical schools that always have very high UCAT cutoffs. The cutoffs do vary each year but some are consistently high and you would be wasting an application.
Definitely don’t study it at the expense of your exams - your grades are vital too. For this reason I would also book the test before you go back to school/college in the autumn. Definitely don’t book in the last week as if you are ill on the day you won’t be able to rebook (you are expected to rebook if you are ill - by taking the test you declare you are fit and there is no adjustment for extenuating circumstances).
If you get a low score, don’t bother applying to medical schools that always have very high UCAT cutoffs. The cutoffs do vary each year but some are consistently high and you would be wasting an application.
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