Hey all, someone asked me for some tips on VR and while I haven't got the greatest score, it certainly is a huge jump to go from 550 to 720!
"To be honest, the biggest change for me in VR was examining the root cause of my mistakes. After each mock, I would write down a reason for each mistake and then practice again. I also have started reading a lot more this year in terms of news, books and stuff so that probably helped. It's honestly just a case of practice, feedback, integrating that feedback into practice and so on. I sucked pretty bad at VR but the more I did it, the more I felt confident. Below is the approach I used:
1. Read the question/ statement first carefully.
2. Pick keywords that I can use to search through the text. If this was a 4-option question instead of a statement, I would prioritise verifying options that contained easy keywords to find eg dates, pronouns etc.
3. Skim through the text and find the keyword. While skimming through the text for the first time, I would also build a mental 'mind-map' of the text so I can easily refer back to the relevant paragraph for future questions.
4. Once I found the sentence containing the keyword, I would read the sentence before and after. This was really crucial.
5. Compare the language and tone of the passage to the question and choose my answer.
6. Skim through the rest of the passage to see if the keyword reappears and whether that changes my answer.
Honestly though, VR is all about reading and absorbing the information carefully in a limited amount of time. I would find that most of my mistakes were skimming over the passage and over-relying on my intuition rather than carefully read the relevant part of the passage. It's a case of reviewing your mistakes, figuring out what you can do next time, and repeat 10000x."
This is what worked for me, so please experiment and see what approach gains you the most amount of marks. For myself, I found that I skimmed too quickly and missing key bits of information, which added to my panic of losing time, which further caused me to skim faster and lose out on key information. Over my practice, I tried to become slower and much more methodical and absorb the text a lot more for each question.
Also, a really good thing I did 2-3 days before my actual UCAT exam was to go through the official q-bank. I put my phone next to me to time myself and went through each question in a chill manner, writing down any mistakes and where I could improve. It was a good way to consolidate all the things I learned from the practice exams I attempted over the past couple of weeks. I did this only for VR and half of DM, and I really wished I did this for AR. If I were to do the exam again next year (hopefully not!), I would complete the whole official q-bank a week or two prior to my actual exam. It may help if the official q-bank is what you initially started out with, but this is what worked for me.
Also, a thing I learned this year that allowed me to get a decent score was shifting my mindset from "mistakes are bad" to "mistakes are good". I would remember panicking and not doing anything a week prior to my exam last year, and try to hype myself up despite my inadequate prep. This year, I took an approach of "let's try to get as many mistakes as possible". Of course I tried my very best to not make mistakes, but I stopped treating mistakes like they were the end of the world. Instead of thinking "my goodness I'm going to fail the actual ucat" when reacting to a bad mock score, I would try to think "good, at least I won't make these kinds of mistakes again in the actual ucat".
Again, this is my experience and it may be vastly different for you. Figure out what works for you and do that!
I hope this helps someone!