Hey everyone,
I'm a current first year undergraduate medicine student at Monash University and so I've had heaps of people asking me for tips and advice on UMAT. So, I thought I'd make a post offering what I learnt from my experiences with UMAT and hopefully some other people can post some of their tips aswell:
1. Start early - although its not the end of the world if you didn't start early (I started with literally a month to go and I survived...although barely) it definitely helps if you started early. Year 12 is stressful enough without the extra work and pressure of UMAT
2. Work on your weaknesses - UMAT is supposed to be all about your natural ability and your not supposed to be able to study for it and although that's so not true and you can definitely study there are definitely some sections that are easier to study for then others. If your naturally fairly good at logical reasoning or understanding people sections then there's only really so much your going to improve from doing a tonne of questions
3. non verbal reasoning YOU CAN STUDY FOR. In my practices for this section I went from about the 30th percentile to the 80th percentile just from using tutorials. Yes you can do question after questions and try to figure out your own techniques but do your self a favour and memorize other peoples techniques - especially mapping techniques and things like that (although UMAT is trying to phase them out because people are realising that its easy to study for them)
4. work on time management - no matter how smart you are there's always going to be questions on UMAT that you can't prepare for- don't waste time on these!!! UMAT time limit is crazy even without wasting time on impossible questions. Don't feel bad about skipping questions at all or even narrowing it down to 2 or 3 and then guessing- it's not like a SAC where you're aiming for 90+% and have to answer every question to get a good score.
5. Don't leave any questions blank- you don't lose marks for wrong answers. Leave yourself 3 or 4 minutes at the end just to make sure you've filled in one circle for every question (not left it blank or with 2 answers for the same question) - who knows that 3 or 4 minutes of random coloring could give you more marks then the 5 minutes you wasted trying to figure out a question you were never going to be able to do
6. Continuously check you are circling the right bubble - it sounds dumb but in the rare event you stuff up it could cost you bad!! (especially if you realize all your answers are out by one buble and you have to take 10 minutes fixing it on your answer sheet.
7. DONT STRESS. UMAT is not everything. There's still other criteria to getting into medicine that can compensate for a dodgy UMAT score and there are heaps of other pathways into medicine that will only take an extra year or two. If you're in the actual UMAT exam and you feel flustered take a minute or two to relax. Although you may lose a little bit of time walking to the toilet in the middle of the exam (like I did to give my brain a refresher) or just pausing to take a breather and sip from your drink bottle it can definitely pay off in the end- 25 minutes of good concentration is so much more effective then 30 minutes of poor concentration.
8. Have a game plan - go into the exam knowing exactly what youre going to do to maximize your score - try different approaches in you practice and work out what works best for you. Personally, I did all the long readings for understanding people in reading time and then memorized my answers so when writing time began I could quickly answer a heap of questions in very little time.
9. Start a scrap book with questions you couldn't do but now can do - including the question and solutions. There is literally no point in doing questions if your not going to learn from your mistakes and a scrap book is the most effective way to do this.
10. Although I hate to do it I think ultimately commercial companies such as MedEntry and others are able to help boost your UMAT score- they are extremely pricey though and people get by without them so don't feel you HAVE to spend $600 on one of these companies
Hope this helps a little
Home
Help
Search
Login
