My thoughts on medentry

[psyxwar]

Hey all, I'm kinda bored atm so I figured I'll write up a quick post on how I found medentry in relation to the actual UMAT. I scored 99%ile on the UMAT this year, with my scores for S1/S2/S3 being 71/69/60. Although I never actually attended the medentry lectures I did have their resources. Overall I'd have to say the program is overrated and frankly a waste of your money. You really don't need to sign up for these types of programs to do well in the UMAT.

I'll compare and contrast medentry to the actual UMAT by section below:

Section 1: Medentry's section 1 drills/ tests were all very reading comprehension heavy. From what I remember, they typically comprised of large amounts of text followed by a few questions on the text, and simply involved you reading the passage and answering the questions based on the passage's information.

The actual UMAT however had a much larger emphasis on problem solving type questions rather than medentry's style of question. I can't give any actual examples of a real UMAT question, but in my opinion medentry's resources were very far from the type of questions posed on the UMAT. I'd recommend buying the ACER practice UMATs for the most accurate representation of what section 1 actually entails.

Section 2: Medentry's section 2 material was also often reading comprehension based. You get a passage, you read it, and you try and describe the emotions and feelings that one of the characters is experiencing. Often, the answers would be contained within the passage itself and it really was just a matter of reading the passage carefully.

The actual UMAT was not like this at all. Section 2 in my opinion was reminiscent of the GAT. It did have passages, as well as other things like comics to analyse. However, the passages in the actual UMAT were much shorter than the medentry ones, and the answers a lot more ambigious. The actual UMAT's section 2 was not a matter of reading comprehension; you really had to look at the text holistically in order to try and grasp which one of the answers was the best one. Even then, you often reached the point where there were 2 answers that seemed equally plausible and you really had to rely on your gut feeling.

Again, for a good taste of the real UMAT I'd recommend the practice tests published by ACER (the company that runs the UMAT). Building a larger emotional vocabulary is also a good start (look up lists of words describing emotions) as you want to know what every possible answer on the exam actually means. As weird as this sounds, the GATs may also serve as valuable practice (mainly the humanities section).

Section 3: Section 3 is the only section where I thought medentry's resources were somewhat accurate. Their patterns tended to be harder than the actual UMATs, though some of the patterns bordered on nonsensical in my opinion and sometimes trying to learn the ultra complex thought process of medentry may actually put you at a disadvantage. Patterns in the actual UMAT tended to be easy enough, and generally the most straight forward solution was correct. Again, the actual ACER practice tests are the best resource, though note that they may be slightly easier than the actual UMAT.

Interestingly, medentry touts something known as the 3-2 rule, which is a 'rule' for the 'Pick the Middle' question type where if there's 3 shapes that are similar and 2 other shapes that are similar than the middle is one of the 3 shapes. I never actually had to use this rule (or any rules really) in the actual UMAT, and I'm not sure if relying on this rule is a good thing to do. But take my advice here with a grain of salt, as section 3 was my worst section.

That's all I have to say for now, I might add more later. I hope this helps any prospective med students!

[nerdmmb]

Hi psyxwar,
This post is extremely helpful and definitely an eye opener. I've been using Medentry for the past two years and it's only wasted my time and my money.

Having said that, I'm sort of lost and don't know how on earth to prepare for next year's UMAT? Any words of advice and how you prepared for the UMAT? Because that is a great score!

[psyxwar]

Hi psyxwar,
This post is extremely helpful and definitely an eye opener. I've been using Medentry for the past two years and it's only wasted my time and my money.

Having said that, I'm sort of lost and don't know how on earth to prepare for next year's UMAT? Any words of advice and how you prepared for the UMAT? Because that is a great score!

Hey nerdmmb, thanks for the question and I'm glad you enjoyed it!

Unfortunately I'm not sure if my own preparation will be of much help to you. I started preparing for the UMAT in July this year (so the month of the UMAT lol) when I realised I had about 3 weeks to go. Honestly, I didn't do anything for sections 1 and 2 except for a couple of drills (and perhaps broadening my vocabulary a bit for S2). Section 3 I probably put the most work into as it was always the hardest for me. I did drills and tried to work out how to tackle the questions - in the end I just went for the mapping technique (which is a bit hard to explain by text, but I'll give it a go if you're not familiar with it).

My lack of effort in S1 and S2 is probably because I read this: http://www.monash.edu.au/study/options/schools/careerseminar/presentations/value-umat-preparation.pdf. I think pi linked me to it, so props to him. Anyway the study basically says that S3 is the only section you can really improve on and I kind of decided to gamble on the other 2 sections.

That probably isn't too helpful though. One broad skill I'd recommend having are speed reading, which'll help you cut down on the time it takes you to read and thus give you more time to actually ponder the question. I barely remember Section 1 of the actual UMAT so I can't really comment much about this, but you can have a look at other tests like the GMAT which might be helpful. Section 2 isn't something you can kind of 'study' in the traditional sense; spamming questions will probably just be detrimental because you start to try and develop a sort of 'pattern'. Something that I think might have helped me here was my experience in talking to people and consoling them when they were down, listening to their problems and helping them through tough times. This is going to be incredibly vague, but try and better yourself as a person, experience more of life and that should hopefully put you in better stead for S2.

The truth with the UMAT is that unfortunately it isn't a test based on how hard you work, and plenty of people study heaps for it only to do poorly. There really isn't any surefire way to do well, although doing the ACER practice tests will give you a fairly good indication of how you find it. Honestly, I don't think it's something you can study for in the traditional sense, but that doesn't mean you can't do things to raise your chances of success. One thing I do recommend is to think about the bigger picture with respect to the UMAT - obviously, you're keen on medicine and sometimes that means you place too much value on the UMAT because you want undergrad medicine badly. In my opinion this can be damaging, because if you don't do well on the UMAT it means you've become demoralised, and often lost in what direction to take from there onwards. Treat the UMAT as a 'key' into undergrad medicine, nothing more, and make sure to consider the other options (post grad at Monash/ Melb for example). An added benefit of not treating it as the be-all-and-end-all is that you won't be as nervous coming into it.

[nerdmmb]

Cheers for that psyxwar! Med is my first preference and like you said, I'll try my best in the UMAT and even if I don't get the required percentile, there's definitely other options available. Then again, my scores so far in the Medentry exercises haven't been that great so I'm preparing myself for the worst in the UMAT.

Thanks again!

[pi]

^As above, Section 3 is really the only one a lot of people find improvement in (my MedEntry experience is similar to above as well, didn't study extensively for months or anything). I know many UMAT tutors claim otherwise, but then again, if they didn't what business would they have?

UMAT is a weird test, no other way for me to put it. My opinion is that you've either "got it" or you "don't got it" (pardon the grammar). And that solely refers to the test. If you unfortunately "don't got it", that doesn't mean you have a low IQ, or are stupid, or are destined for a crappy ATAR, or anything like that; it just means your mind doesn't tick in the way of this test. And that's /fine/,and maybe JCU or graduate-entry pathways are better suited to you.

If you've been doing MedEntry since yr10 (noting that most people who get into med start sometime in yr12) and not seeing the improvement to put you into a 90%ile+ bracket, maybe the test isn't for you. That's not to say "give up" (I mean, 6 months is a lot of time!), but I certainly wouldn't be prioritising it at the expense of your ATAR (which can help with JCU, for example).

Hopefully that wasn't insulting or anything, that's just my gut feeling about the UMAT and your particular situation.

[nerdmmb]

^As above, Section 3 is really the only one a lot of people find improvement in (my MedEntry experience is similar to above as well, didn't study extensively for months or anything). I know many UMAT tutors claim otherwise, but then again, if they didn't what business would they have?

UMAT is a weird test, no other way for me to put it. My opinion is that you've either "got it" or you "don't got it" (pardon the grammar). And that solely refers to the test. If you unfortunately "don't got it", that doesn't mean you have a low IQ, or are stupid, or are destined for a crappy ATAR, or anything like that; it just means your mind doesn't tick in the way of this test. And that's /fine/,and maybe JCU or graduate-entry pathways are better suited to you.

If you've been doing MedEntry since yr10 (noting that most people who get into med start sometime in yr12) and not seeing the improvement to put you into a 90%ile+ bracket, maybe they test isn't for you. That's not to say "give up", but I certainly wouldn't be prioritising it at the expense of your ATAR (which can help with JCE, for example).

Hopefully that wasn't insulting or anything, that's just my gut feeling about the UMAT and your particular situation.

Thanks Pi and no I'm not offended at all!

[psyxwar]

Oh just something else I remembered - I ended up doing the UMAT by section (I did section 2, section 1 then section 3). If you do do this please make sure you have enough time to finish or at least do the majority of each section. I say this because one of my friends got something like 95%ile but she got 49 in section 3 because she ran out of time to do it properly and ended up guessing a lot. You need above 50 in every section to be considered for undergrad med at many universities, no matter how good your final score is. Couple of my friends missed out due to failing one section and it really sucks to miss out this way.

[Nguyensanity]

Psyxwar, articulate and accurate as always 

From my experience (97, 61/60/72) the most important part of my preparation was definitely time management. Usually when people ask me about my preparation, time management and getting back to basics with your exam technique is the main point I would stress. I believe that it's difficult (not impossible) to improve S1 and S2, and maybe show a bit of improvement on S3 of the exam. They pretty much design the UMAT that way in a sense. They aren't testing any prior knowledge, just critical thinking and logical skills. That being said, it would be foolish not to do at least some practice; in S3, with a bit of practice, you'll be able to recognise a few recurring patterns that come up again and again (e.g. angle movement 45/90/135/180 etc)

So if that's something you can't improve, you could at least give yourself a better chance of using the skills you do have to have a really good crack at all the questions. This is where planning out how you're going to tackle a 3-hour exam comes into play. Finishing the exam with enough time to have a read and educated guess (at the very least) of each question will be very advantageous, compared to those who have to play catch-up and wildly guess the last 20 or so in the last 5 minutes of the exam.

I personally also did the UMAT in different sections; S3 first, since they were easy to spot and I found S3 to be one of my stronger sections - then S1, because they were clumped into sets related to one passage (usually) and I wanted to make sure I got them done - and then S2. I finished the exam with 15 minutes to spare after making a conscious effort on every single question; then I just went over and made sure the right bubbles were coloured for the right questions, I wasn't missing any, etc.

To end, I did do the MedEntry program, and mostly relied on their online portal for practice exams. Truth is, you could probably find these somewhere if you looked hard enough so in a way, this renders the portal (and the program) not worth it? I did around 5-6 full length practice exams in the lead up to the UMAT (also starting a month-3 weeks ish before, you still have school SACs etc) and experimented with my exam technique, straight through from 1-~134, or by section 1/2/3. Don't be too disheartened by scores you get on that portal though; I was scoring 80-90/134 on all my trials.

Also - agree that some of MedEntry's S3 examples are out of this world insane - the reasoning they give when you go through the answers... *facepalm*

[psyxwar]

Seeing as the UMAT is coming up for 2016, I thought I should bump this up!

[blacksanta62]

Seeing as the UMAT is coming up for 2016, I thought I should bump this up!

Thanks psyxwar! It actually really benefited me as I'm sure it will others. One of the major things I took away from this is the fact that the UMAT is not the be all end all, and reading that has reinforced it into my mind. I defs feel a lot better (confidence is over 9000  ) and calmer about this test. I'm actually wondering how many other useful threads are on this site which are unread by current students 
 

[Swagadaktal]

Thanks psyxwar! It actually really benefited me as I'm sure it will others. One of the major things I took away from this is the fact that the UMAT is not the be all end all, and reading that has reinforced it into my mind. I defs feel a lot better (confidence is over 9000  ) and calmer about this test. I'm actually wondering how many other useful threads are on this site which are unread by current students 
 

^ Second that. No idea how I haven't seen this. Thanks this is really great.
The UMAT so many people take yet there's not as much discussion to calm my farm. This one really did give me some peace of mind. Haven't been studying much umat recently because I don't feel like it's an effective use of my time at my current state (im afraid ill start over complicating stuff) - so yeah this helps out a bit

[pouya1234]

Hey psyxwar, doing the umat this month, and ive doing really crappy in medentry papers. Most recently my percentile was 44 and thats really stressed me out. Im doing particularly badly in section 3 which sucks because when i was doing F2F papers i found section three extremely easy. Section 1 and 2 are ok, I do pretty well in them when i focus and take my time, but this results in me not finishing on time. Just wanted some tips on how i could improve.
Also in regards to your marks for each section i wanted to know if they were percentages or a mark out of a particular number of questions, because most of your percentages were around 70 and you got a 99%ile which could mean theres hope for me 
Thanks!

[blacksanta62]

Along with the question above, if we get a scores 57/62/68, are those the percentages we got from each section? I ask because there isn't 70 questions but people say I got a score of 70 in section 3 for example.
Thanks

[pi]

Section scores are NOT percentages. They are NOT percentiles. They can even exceed 100. They're calculated via a mystical ACER formula that no one has ever cracked. It's rumoured some questions are weighted more than others and they add up the score for each question.

The best thing you can do is not play the numbers game, just go into the hall on the day and give it your all.

[blacksanta62]

Yep, numbers game gets you down in the dumps
Thanks for clarifying though, cleared up something that was really confusing me