Well, just to start off with, and by no means am I offended or anything, but it seems that you have taken a subtle personal attack on me. I sincerely apologise if my earlier post appeared to express contempt or annoyance towards you; know that any negativity is directed towards the UMAT.
I politely suggest that you lack perspective, as the UMAT does serve a useful purpose
Would you rather the expense of sitting an apptitude test at every university you apply to? No, and neither does the university.
It's not the concept of the UMAT that exasperates me, rather that it is of extremely poor design. And this is something that can be fixed, all it would take is for ACER to scrap Sections 2 and 3 and stop reusing past questions.
You may call it a "feel-good" activity, but if one is truly brilliant at school, then there are ways of gaining entry without meeting a certain, arbitrary UMAT cut-off. The higher your ENTER at UNSW, the less your UMAT has to be, a UMAT of about 150ish is acceptable if you gain an ENTER of around 99.8, which should be a cinch in our easier secondary school, right? If you attain a similarly high ENTER for UAdel, they offer a later round of interviews for students with previously lower UMAT scores. JCU don't use the UMAT at all. So Singapore may have a more high-school academically friendly entry system (if that's even posible under a lottery system), but where would you rather go to med school?
My reference to it as 'feel-good' is in relation to the public image it creates, the whole notion that somehow it selects candidates based on good qualities, while there is in fact no comparison possible to see whether selecting candidates through UMAT is effective at producing better doctors, which is ostensibly the entire basis for the existence of the UMAT. If we aren't creating better doctors, then why should UMAT exist at all? To generate money for ACER? A lottery system at least guarantees fairness.
I'm not sure what you mean by asking where I would rather go to for med. I don't want to make any suggestion that Singapore is 'better' in its education system. Their quantity certainly trumps Australia's, but quality is another question altogether. Poor choice of wording in my previous post when I just woke up, my bad.
Fairness is never guaranteed in selective based entry to a university course? You may beleive that UMAT courses give you "the edge", but often their own negative impressions of the interview stage produce students who beleive interviewers are out to trick them, and therefore spend the whole interview secind guessing the interviewers questions and themselves
Rather irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
My own UMAT score was terrible, but i will defend its use, typically the people who have the most to sy negatively about the UMAT are people who feel as though it hamper their own chances of gaining entry. You have to ask youself whether you are biased abou the UMAT, simply because it doesn't suit you.
I don't believe myself to be biased at all. I have little, if any passion towards medicine(probably going to be third or fourth preference) as I am, by my own judgement, far too cynical for a career as a doctor. Perhaps you have noticed this?
I also have no idea how I went in UMAT. Thought I did pretty well but we'll wait to September for that. I guess this is a cue for us to stop the off-topic and agree to disagree?
I undertook 2 UMAT prep courses last year and saw one question that was similar to any of the prep course questions. I'm happy that you felt ready for the exam orsel, but many students are not. They are also releived of $400-700 for their "peace of mind".
I too only saw one similar question. But I know for a fact that reuse of questions occurs through forum-trawling references to past questions which have appeared in UMAT '08. It also seems that your own skepticism of prep courses parallels mine of UMAT?
Congratulations go to you for getting into your desired course, but frankly the process for medicine entry shouldn't be like this.