For the future HSC students, My advice will be to target 99% for ATAR and spend the whole first 6 months of your HSC year to get a very good UMAT(all sections) results. ALL the big unis(Sydney and Melbourne) don't care about UMAT but UWS, UQ and even UNE put more weight on UMAT. I find it absurd.
-
Welcome to MSO!
We are an online community for current and prospective medical, dental and allied health students and early career professionals from Australia and New Zealand.Please read: About MSO | Annual Welcome and Important Information | MSO Rules
Quick Links To Forums
Tests/Interviews: UCAT | GAMSAT | Interviews Entrance Discussion: Graduate Medicine | Undergraduate Medicine | Dentistry -
Please consider registering on MSO. Benefits of registering are:
- Able to post and participate in the forum
- After 10 posts: Private Message Other Users
- After 25 posts: Access to the Chatbox
- After 100 posts: Custom user titles and Ad-free experience
If you would like to get involved with MSO or have ideas, suggestions, comments, criticisms or other feedback please Contact Us
For the future HSC students... UMAT
- Thread starter Bala
- Start date
iMMO
WSU MBBS V
Get your facts straight please, Melb and USyd as post-grad unis, they take GAMSAT instead of UMAT. And for the provisional places those are only got 99.95 students, and the course is pretty much a BScience degree + MD, aka its guaranteed POST-GRAD offer not undergrad.
I'm not sure how you find it absurd. If anything, absurd are the "big uni's" with the 99.95/99.9 atar cutoffs!
Most people should be appreciative they decided to use UMAT because otherwise the minimum atar to enter medicine would be inaccessible to most except those who achieve very high 99s.
But yea, people should dedicate more time to UMAT I agree.
Hi, I didn't mean to undermine UMAT aor ATAR here. My feeling is that getting a 99+ ATAR is much harder than getting 95%. But the difference between 95% and 99% in UMAT may be due to 3/4 more correct answers. Furthermore, I don't believe that UMAT helps to select the perfect (let's say good) doctors for the future. I think the UNSW selection processes seems to be very reasonable and it is more or less similar to the British universities. To be frank, My family doctor is "Dr Google", then I will talk to a real doctor, because I have this feeling that doctors are not smart enough to handle my back pain (just kidding).
iMMO
WSU MBBS V
The idea behind 95 ATAR was to compensate for the inherent flaws of it. E.g. the school you attend can significantly impact your ATAR. Some people don't live in areas with good schools, don't have the same opportunities etc. (I believe, not 100%) Whilst UMAT is trying to test your inherent skills and not knowledge. Now whether UMAT actually does this is debatable, but I think that’s kind of the approach they were trying to take. They are essentially saying, if you can get 95 ATAR we believe you have the capabilities to complete the course, and then everyone’s on a level playing field with UMAT. (I think, this is my interpretation, may be entirely wrong).
Neither Atar nor Umat not even the Interview allows the unis to select the perfect-for-doctor applicants. Still no-one knows what it is otherwise all the unis would have adopted the same selection criteria. UMAT is simply a believed-to-be-fair tool to help cull down the number of applicants to interview. As iStudent said, if you don't believe in Umat being used then try get 99.8+ and go for Flinders or Griffith instead.
You raised very good points here. I used to live (and study) in UK as well (now you know I am an old guy). I never noticed such discrepancies (in performance) in UK schools. Another thing, I thought Students from these so-called good schools will still end up scoring much better UMAT than students from other school in general(specially in section 1 & 3). In that case, it defeats the purpose.
Hmm, I would have to disagree to some extent. ATAR is a number, defined by your rank amongst that graduating cohort.
Of course, without doubt, Medicine is an academically rigorous and demanding course.... Thus, a "high ATAR" reflects your academic skills (to some extent).... It wouldn't seem logical to allow a "lesser-able" student to complete a course where they wouldn't be able to complete it.. I am not saying they can't, but ATAR is a way to ensure that one is able to complete such a jam packed course
iMMO
WSU MBBS V
Can't really compare them properly since they involve vastly different concepts. And I doubt it, though I have heard of people going from Engo --> Med, and in rare case Law --> med.
iMMO
WSU MBBS V
That is great advice! Thanks! But what if i get a 100th percentile that's like 60 49 85 or something?
I dispute this. I feel like your current advice to future med students is resoundingly... don't.
I feel like sarcasm doesn't translate well here.I dispute this. I feel like your current advice to future med students is resoundingly... don't.
Some people are able to get 99 ATAR as suggested by the first post and some aren't. I feel like the advice to just get 99 is silly and doesn't help - I could just as well say my suggestion is to get into medicine first try.
Last edited:
You can't stop the (deleted brainy) clever students from doing well at both ATAR and UMAT. However you will find equal numbers of students with high ATAR but relatively low UMAT and vice versa. So no I don't think it defeats the purpose.
Demanding but not to the extent that only 99.0+ students can successfully complete. Arguably around 95+ can too being the minimum set by many unis, but interviewing all 95+ (around 15,000 students Aus-wide) would be too many to cope with. What would be your suggestion other than UMAT to cull down the interviewee number?
Last edited:
So you are suggesting that the post-graduate entry courses know a better process?
Despite the fact that their students are older and the vast majority of them were people who were never competitive enough to get into undergraduate medicine in the first place?
Not all doctors need to have empathetic communication skills, and while it's a desirable trait to have, it's not more important than being intelligent enough to be medically competent, which is what the ATAR is used as a guide to.
There are always schools which have smarter students than others because they are the ones that select those students at the point of entry. There are students who are smarter than other students and they are more likely to get into schools that are more selective with their entry.
The purpose of the UMAT isn't to omit those from high scoring schools - you'll find that while there are people who get low ATARs and high UMAT and vice versa that actually the UMAT is positively correlated with a high ATAR - that is, people with high ATAR tend to get high UMAT and people with low ATAR tend to get low UMAT.
What exactly did you think the purpose of the UMAT was, that was defeated in this case?