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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