Thanks so much for the kind replies jeyda, ash and Evolio!!!! Your support means so much.
THE UCATPrepare yourselves. This might be a bit of a long update
.
Before I talk about my experience, I'd like to express my MASSIVE gratitude to everyone: family, friends, relatives, fellow AN buddies, 'random girl on the internet' (you know who you are) and just AN in general for being awesome. This test has been a pivotal point in my life and honestly, couldn't have done it without all the support and kind words from everyone in my life. <3
I bet half of youse are going to skip straight to where I'm gonna post my results, so I'm just going to post my results right here
:
Verbal Reasoning - 700
Decision Making - 670
Quantitative Reasoning - 880
Abstract Reasoning - 870
TOTAL - 3120
Situational Judgement - 643
I was (and still am) completely SHOCKED. Never in a MILLION, BILLION, heck even TRILLION years did I ever think I would get this high. Honestly, walking out of the exam I thought I was going to get borderline 90th percentile, but would you look at that!!! I actually did extremely well!!!! For those of you who don't know how UCAT scoring works, basically I did really well! According to last year, this score would be a 98th percentile. Hopefully this year, it's the same (or a 99th percentile - I definitely wouldn't complain if I got a higher percentile hah).
VENUEDid my exam at Airport West and at 11am. You might be thinking why the hell I did my test here if there were centres at Boxhill, Footscray, Melbourne CBD and I think there was one at Footscray West/East/North/South (I can't remember which one it was 😅). I wanted to do my UCAT in approx. the middle of term 2 holidays so I still had time to study for assessments at school that are taking place the first week back, and I wanted a morning session (I did mine at 11am) because I was scared I'd be too tired to do it during any evening time. So yeah, chose this testing centre because of date + time. OKAY ANYWAYS, I actually visited this testing centre last Sunday, because I'd never been around Airport West before and I didn't want everything to be foreign on the day of the test - having SOME familiarity with the place seemed like a good idea.
After my first visit, I expected the testing centre to have crusty old computers with extremely archaic Pearson software and creaky floorboards (you get the idea). Wasn't really like that though haha. Before the test I was highkey freaking out because all the other testing centres seemed so professional and yeah, don't do what I did because it doesn't matter where you do the UCAT, just give it your best shot. It took around a 1 and a half hour drive there, so I just chilled out to the radio, read a magazine and read some random Wikipedia articles in preparation for VR (following 2019's highest UCAT scorer's awesome tip: don't let VR be the first thing you read on the day!).
The registration process was very quick and easy, just had to fill in this form thingo and give in my ID, then gave the camera my biggest smile. I was taken into the testing room, where there were already candidates doing the test. Basically, everyone was from the 11am timeslot, except they had started really early because they got there early (which is funny, because I thought I walked in really early at 10:20am). Airport West was actually one of the places that DIDN'T provide earplugs, but funnily they had earplugs so I had to use those. They were really similar to the disposable earplugs I took to the testing centre myself, so no issues there. The centre also provided a cute lil drink bottle so thank god I didn't die from thirst during the test!!! We were given a bunch of yellow laminated sheets (bigger than A4) with grids that were spiral-bound together - there was more than enough of these (I only used 2 - one for DM and 1 for QR). I also had to wear a facemask during my test - luckily I had done a few practice mocks with a mask so it wasn't too bad, but it was very uncomfortable! I kept having to hold the mask out so I could actually breathe, which was weird because I never felt like that during my practice mocks (maybe I wore it wrong or something, idk). My reading glasses also kept fogging up so that was annoying, because I had learnt a way to position my glasses/mask so they wouldn't fog up during practice but that didn't work in the actual test.
Overall a pretty smooth experience!
TEST EXPERIENCENOTES: I do not divulge any specifics of each test or any particular questions - that would be called cheating haha, this is just general info on how I found everything!!! Also, there are multiple tests in circulation and different people find different things hard - take my experience with a grain of salt if you are also doing the UCAT later on, because ymmv.
VR:I think VR was the exact same feel as the official resources. Before the test, I thought I'd at least be able to snag a 750 (especially considering VR would sometimes be my best section during practice), but I'm pretty happy with the 700. I was super nervous during VR and my hands were shaking because I just kept thinking over and over about how this 2-hour test would be weighted the same as my ATAR and yikes! Why did my brain decide to do that! We'd already been through this brain - no panicking! I finished with time left over, which I used to go over a passage I had skipped and go over other questions which I guesstimated. I didn't get to go over all the flagged questions I had guessed though, I hate that VR is so inference-y and implication-y.
DM:Ok, YIKES. I'm no good at DM, but I was never expecting a score this low! I found DM quite hard - I was spending too long on those syllogisms and I kept trying to hurry up and just put an answer down and keep going because I didn't want to run out of time. Because of that, I have a feeling I lost marks on those pesky syllogisms. The logic puzzles were... not too bad I think. I think I still stuffed up a few though
. Some of the probability questions were wack iirc, but overall I actually think it was sorta similar to the official resources, I think I just panicked throughout this section because of my poor VR performance and kept worrying about the next section (QR). I finished early and went through the questions I sorta guesstimated and wasn't sure about.
QR:My biggest surprise! Once I finished the test, I felt like this score would miraculously be my best, and I was correct! I felt QR to be really easy - MUCH easier than the official mocks to say the least. I was really surprising myself as I cruised through the questions - I always got an answer that was one of the answer options (looks like I stuffed up somewhere though, considering my score!). You won't believe this, but I finished 7 whole minutes early. I took like 3 minutes to answer 2 questions that I had skipped and flagged, so had 4 minutes to just go through the rest of the section. I went to the start of the subsection and started redoing the questions in order to confirm if they were correct. Retrospectively, it would have been a better idea if I redid some of the questions I was a bit iffy about (coulda gotten a better score maybe!), but whatever that's not something my puny brain would have thought to do in a stressful test situation. 😂
AR:Ok so after doing this section I was expecting like a ~600-700, didn't expect 870 even in my wildest dreams!!!!!! There was one entire pattern I couldn't get AT ALL - I came back to it a couple of times and still couldn't get it haha. I feel like if I had more time I would have gotten it, but I mean 13 minutes for 55 questions isn't exactly generous, is it? AR was sorta similar to the official mocks but sorta not - I feel like the official mocks had a greater proportion of qns with much harder conditional rules. There was also one pattern that I was SUPER iffy about, like I knew the pattern I'd formulated in my head wasn't the right pattern, or wasn't fully right, but I went with it anyway and looks like I got it correct! AR was like a blur, it went so fast!
SJTAlrightio, this one was a bit weird. There were some scenarios I had never come across in my practice - I was expecting SJT to be more like how I felt during my practice, but it wasn't too bad I guess. Had a very similar feel to the official resources, except for some of the scenarios which I'd never come across. Overall it wasn't too bad, I obviously finished with loads of time left over. I decided to go over the entire of SJT again (changed quite a few answers in the process). It was weird to be going through my answers for SJT since that's something I never did during mock exams - I just got through SJT as quick as I could and would end the test haha. After doing SJT twice I still had time left and honestly could not be bothered so I just ended the test and left.
If those of you sitting the UCAT want to know the scores I got on my mock exams and mini-mocks (I used Medify, MedEntry and the official resources provided by Pearson), then of course you can!!! You can find them in this post
here.
If you actually read even SOME of this massive journal update, I'll be grateful! <3 For those reading this post who are yet to do the UCAT, I want you guys to believe in yourself. Do NOT panic and stress yourself out (haha I'm a hypocrite, literally had a mental breakdown last night thinking about what would happen if I didn't score well on the UCAT). Good luck you guys!
I'm super proud of what I achieved - something I didn't think I
could achieve in the first place. I just hope that this UCAT score takes me one step closer to my dream, Monash Med.