3 Things you can do to Make the UCAT Seem Easy 📖

You'll never find a single medical or dental student who sat the UCAT and didn't struggle with it... initially. When I sat the UCAT in 2019 in the first ever UCAT-sitting cohort in Australia, I found the test horrifying.

Verbal Reasoning's time constraint felt like I was being constricted by a snake 🐍.

Decision Making's complexity left me spellbound 🪄.

Quantitative Reasoning's deceptive simplicity caught me off-guard 🙊.

Abstract Reasoning's mystery was too puzzling for me 🧩.

And Situational Judgement had me questioning my ethics 😇. 

 

How did I go from feeling like this 👆 to finding the UCAT much easier (eventually) and scoring in the 98th Percentile? I did the following 3 things and you can too!

1. Coming to terms with your weaknesses 📉

If there's one thing that'll skyrocket 🚀 your UCAT score, it's admitting your weaknesses.

It's unwise to be smashing out practice questions for a subtest you're scoring 90% on if you've got another subtest you're barely scoring 40% for - the opportunity for growth is so much more for your weaker section. It's unlikely that you'd go from 90% to 100% (a 10% increase) for your strong section but it's absolutely conceivable to go from 40% to 60% (a 20% increase) for your weaker section! 

2. Treating the UCAT like any other subject you study ⚖️

OK, maybe not like I treated English (I neglected English big time💀) but you get the point...

Have a structure to the way you prepare for the UCAT just like you'd prepare for, say, a math exam. For math exams, you:

The UCAT isn't any different! Doing this will ensure you aren't aimlessly jumping between steps 1-3 (as MOST applicants do). 

3. CHILL TF OUT 🍹

HONESTLY... This is THE MOST IMPORTANT point 📣.

I had plenty of days where my UCAT prep just wasn't working out. I even had 2 weeks where abstract reasoning and I were just not on the same page - I was scoring well below 50% in my practice questions (I had a lovely relationship with abstract reasoning in the end 💏 - scored 890 in it)! It's OK to have days/weeks where UCAT prep doesn't go so well. It's actually normal. You don't need to be getting great scores every single day of your prep to get a great UCAT percentile. 

Every single applicant will have bad UCAT prep days. Poor scoring applicants allow themselves to be consumed by these bad UCAT prep days. On the other hand, applicants who score in the top percentiles accept that there'll be bad days in prep and actively disallow those bad days to define their true UCAT ability.

So chill TF out and go get that top UCAT score!