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Post UCAT Discussion Thread 2021

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DrDrLMG!

Resident Medical Officer
Administrator
hey guys, i did the ucat this morning and didn't do well. i received 2420 :(

As a rural applicant, is it even worth applying for any universities with this score?

Definitely don’t give up yet! Once percentiles are released we will open up a thread where people can post all the important info and we will give you more detailed feedback then.

until then, concentrate on the stuff you can have more control over, especially ATAR and mental health.

Well done for getting through it, great job!!
 
I have retaken the UCAT for a second time this year! Seeing all your AMAZING scores makes me think the UCAT 90th percentile will likely be around 3000 this year.........who agrees?

My last year scores are in brackets

VR: 700 (590)
DM: 660 (780)
QR: 730 (660)
AR: 750 (690)

SJT: 637 (533)

Overall: 2840 (2720)

My brain is too fried to write out how I felt in each section but if anyone asks I will be happy to reply perhaps tomorrow :) I sincerely hope this isn't too low for non-standard entry. This happened to me last year I thought my score was 83rd percentile but the percentiles shifted so it ended up being 73rd. Since this is roughly 85th last year in my mind i expect it to go down to 75th which may not be enough for a rural candidate at UoA dentistry or CSU.

Hey mod's please remove my last paragraph if it violates anything. I tried not to "ask" about scores or predictions as I know that is BANNED. This was just me personally reflecting haha.

Also I am in VIC and my testing centre was closed but managed to move it to an open one on the same day. PHEW! anyone in the sam eboat? When has the testing period been extended to? When does everyone think percentiles will be released?
Congrats that's a great improvement and overall score! do you have any tips for improving VR? I had the same score last year (590) and am struggling to bring it up to a 700 (at least) in practice mocks. I usually read the question first and then skim the text for an answer, which works for t/f but other questions I find it harder to go through each option, especially opinions/ drawing conclusions.
 

jhsane

Member
Congrats on your score! Do you have any tips for VR I'm struggling to keep my score above 600 in timed conditions? I tend to use the read the question first and skim for the answer strategy, it works for t/f/ct but otherwise I spend too much time on the other questions. Anything will help!
i think it's pretty difficult :( i do agree that reading the question first is better for t/f/ct
maybe try really quickly reading the question first to see if u need to read the passage? if i see its author or conclusion i usually read the passage quickly? sorry if this doesn't help im not the best at vr
 
i think it's pretty difficult :( i do agree that reading the question first is better for t/f/ct
maybe try really quickly reading the question first to see if u need to read the passage? if i see its author or conclusion i usually read the passage quickly? sorry if this doesn't help im not the best at vr
I'll definitely give that a go. Thanks!
 

Jamiecsms

Member
Hi everyone, been a lurker for a while but I just had my UCAT today! I am a repeat test taker taking a gap year (completed year 12 last year) btw and I'm also a metro applicant

Date completed: 03/07/21
Venue: Box Hill (Victoria)
General thoughts on your results: Super happy with my score of 3180 which was MUCH better than my last year result of 2710! Goes to show getting a "disappointing" score the first time is perfectly okay as you have another chance to try again
General comments on your experience: I did everything different this year compared to last year from how I approached exam day to my actual strategies for tackling UCAT questions. This experience was much better for me - the admin people were really nice and most importantly, I had a positive mindset!!! I think having experience from last year was the main reason I was able to stay reasonably calm which probably contributed a fair bit to my score. Overall, I feel super relieved !!

I read a few success stories on here last year about repeat test takers which actually gave me hope so hopefully sharing my experience can do the same :)
How'd you find the difficulty of last years vs this years, trying to determine whether to expect a big raise in percentile
 

Wolfles

CCCS MD-JMP III
How'd you find the difficulty of last years vs this years, trying to determine whether to expect a big raise in percentile
Percentiles are relative. It depends on how well the 2021 cohort performs. If the UCAT exam is significantly more difficult this year, it would have minimal impact on the number of people within each percentiles as the majority of people will do worse, and Pearson VUE will do some fancy statistics to adjust the bell curves accordingly.
If you are trying to predict the cutoffs for each percentile, don’t bother as MSO only has a small percentage of the total UCAT test takers. Just because some people do extremely well here does not mean the wider ANZ will perform just as well. There are also only 2 year’s worth of statistics to work off (as UCAT changed from UMAT).
Furthermore, difficulty is relative, and there are usually 3 test papers that Pearson circulates during exam season (which again they use stats to even out the bias in the difficulty of the paper). Just sit tight or do your best on exam day. 🙂
 

related

Member
thank you LMG
Definitely don’t give up yet! Once percentiles are released we will open up a thread where people can post all the important info and we will give you more detailed feedback then.

until then, concentrate on the stuff you can have more control over, especially ATAR and mental health.

Well done for getting through it, great job!!
 
Hey, would you guys say that the QR questions were really wordy with lots of data, or were they relatively simple?
Hey orangeuser,

I can only speak for myself but my QR questions were quite straightforward and not wordy. There were sets with diagrams and one with a pie chart but again, none were too wordy.
Hope this helps and good luck! :)
 

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Thank you so much.
Did you find QR difficulty similar to mocks C and D. Because Mock A QR was REALLY hard.
Happy to help!
I did find Mock A significantly harder than the real exam. Mock C and D both were also slightly harder than the real exam. However, this may just have been for me and my exam which could differ with what you get. But, to answer your question, the QR was quite a bit easier in my exam.
 

Wolfles

CCCS MD-JMP III
Hello guys, just a question of interest. How many universities can you apply for med??
No limit. Go wild :). Keep in mind all states have a limited amount of universities to apply in total, so if you are planning to do other degrees, you may need to cut some universities out. However if it is purely medicine, you should theoretically be able to apply each university in Australia.
 
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A1

Rookie Doc
Moderator
Hello guys, just a question of interest. How many universities can you apply for med??
Depends what life stage you're at. As a Y12 student about 14 med schools, as a pre-grad uni student 5, as a uni grad about 18.
How many you are competitive for is a different matter though.
 
Hey guys, those who sat the UCAT this year - how did you guys find the QR question banks on the official website in comparison to the real exam?
Also any tips for someone scoring 500-600 range in QR mini mocks?? mainly because of speed issues :((
 

Nanokshi

Lurker
Hi everyone, just checking if anyone has their test booked at the ITIC centre after the 30th of July, should we be rescheduling at this current stage?
 

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Hey guys, those who sat the UCAT this year - how did you guys find the QR question banks on the official website in comparison to the real exam?
Also any tips for someone scoring 500-600 range in QR mini mocks?? mainly because of speed issues :((
Hey Blueberries,
I can't answer your question fully as I only completed the very first few questions of the official QR bank but out of those, I found that they were only very slightly harder but I think it was good to practice on. However, the QR subtest on the official mock exams (i.e. Mock A and B) were significantly harder than the real exam. Remember: that is only me; it may not apply to you.

As for any tips, I think being quite familiar with percentage calculations (e.g. % changes, % of numbers, difference in numbers given the percentages etc.), ratios and fractions (very important), timetables and conversions (e.g. currency, speed, units like mass and length etc.) are very very important. Being quick with these calculations by using shortcuts and being familiar with the number pad. Another important thing is that if you don't know or don't understand a question first time around, guess an answer (I guessed C 😆), move on and come back. That actually worked in my real exam as well so its works well.

Sorry for this long post but hope it helps. Good luck!
 
hey everyone! it was my first time sitting the ucat this year. i'm a non-rural/non-indigenous applicant so i have the standard (super competitive) domestic entry. i'm currently in year 12 so just for some context, i began my prep start of last year where tbh i didn't take it that seriously so i did 2 hours every weekend (some weekends i missed). my prep got more serious this year in march where i began doing approx hour of ucat four times a week (and ofc with year 12 this fluctuated a lot). i barely did ucat prep in june since term 2 got super hectic so i had to prioritise my ATAR here. however, i had a three week term break where ALL I DID WAS UCAT so i did approx 5 hours everyday for the three weeks leading up to my ucat (some days this did burn me out so i'd advise coming up with a plan where u take breaks and/or set goals for a specific amt of qs to do to balance it out). so yeah i can totally understand how hard it is to balance year 12 and ucat so hats off to everyone who got amazing scores despite that.


Date completed: 17th July, 2021

Venue: Adelaide City Centre

Results:

VR: 500 (avg: 550 in mocks)
DM: 630 (avg: 600 in mocks)
QR: 740 (avg: 750 in mocks)
AR: 860 (avg: 750 in mocks)
TOTAL: 2730 (highest mock score: 2600)
SJT: 663


General advice for each section:
VR:
clearly this was my absolute weakest section but i ended up doing MUCH worse than expected. so yes, i completely froze. i tried super hard to go in with a positive mindset and calm my nerves but it took me a while to get used to the fact that i was actually giving "the real thing". my mind was just clouded with thoughts that didn't help me retain any of the VR passages. so for the first 8 mins of VR i basically didn't retain anything. pls guys try not to do what i did, idk how but just don't !! so my "strategy" for VR was to skip to the T/F/CT qs first which helped in mocks (otherwise i was getting 400s lol). so maybe that's something u might wanna try. but yeah, passages were short but i can say that the keyword approach did NOT work for most of the passages !!! so don't rely on that too much and practise reading to RETAIN the information.

DM: i had heard that narrative syllogisms KILLED most people so i decided to leave them till the end but ran out of time (spent too long doing logic puzzles ugh) so i guessed 'no' for all narrative syllogisms :(( i'm pretty sure that's where i lost most of my marks but as u can see from my mock avgs, DM was my second weakest section so didn't have many expectations there.

QR: like everyone, i did find it slightly easier than mocks but i scored about the same as my mock avg, my main advice here would be to SKIP those long tables where they ask u to calculate avgs (me and a couple friends had that) because they literally waste so much time. ur gonna be super tempted to do it cause its easy but pls flag, guess, do shorter qs and come back to it. also i had Pythagoras and some of my friends did have tax qs pop up which might seem rare but they did show up (so might wanna practise that just in case ur not that familiar with it)

AR: MAIN ADVICE i would give to people sitting it in the future and for my surprisingly good AR score is, even if you cant be bothered doing ucat prep everyday, try and do AR questions. with every other section, i belive u can get away with cramming (though its not ideal), but AR, u need to build the skills OVER TIME. the exposure to all the different patterns really enhanced ur skills and ur ability to recognise what u should look for when specific patterns show up. i did the whole section and still had 2 mins remaining to recheck my answers and go over some i flagged.

SJT: i clearly was so done with the exam at this point that i had given up on SJT lol but i wish i had given it more attention to do a bit better (especially with my low total score, SJT could've helped boost me up a little bit)

General comments on your experience:

i was defs disappointed with my score since i spent more than year prepping for it (even if i didn't take it seriously at the beginning). then again, with my highest mock score (out of the 19 mocks i did), i didn't expect to do that well either but still gave it my best shot so i'm glad i did better than my mocks but sadly, not well enough. since i am based in Adelaide, if i had gotten this score in 2020, i'd get an interview (SA applicants cutoff was 2650) for UofAdl but not sure what the cutoff will be this year (really really hoping its the same or a bit lower even but is unlikely). i'm still open to jcu and griffith etc so will fully focus on ATAR now and see how it goes. i hope the advice helps someone and if u have any qs, i'd be more than happy to answer them :))
 
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