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Tips for UCAT Improvement

Fili

Dentist 🦷
Moderator
Hiya,
I have my UCAT in August, so I got a couple months left. I have been doing some practice for UCAT over the last month or so. With each of my practice sessions, I have been revising my mistakes and understanding why I got a certain question wrong. I probably spend more time revising then actually doing the question because I get so many wrong haha...

The problem is I have become a bit demotivated because I haven't seen much improvement over the last month. While there has been some very very minor improvements on my other sections, my VR is pretty much the same. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong? Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks!

Quite normal - I very very slowly improved throughout the 3 weeks I did prep for UCAT back in 2019, then two days right before the test, I got some 93rd percentiles on some mocks and did fine on the actual thing.

My advice is to take a break from it for a bit. Like you said, you've been preparing for the last month, and still have all of April, May, June and July to continue preparing. My 2 cents, stop doing UCAT for like 2 weeks and relax. No point burning out and over stressing 4 months before the test.
 
Hi all, I have been doing a lot of study time on UCAT. My current strategy has been initially doing a test, then spending time reviewing and reflecting/ writing notes on what I could do better or different strategies I could try next time. I will then look at the question types I did worst at, proceed to do untimed practice to develop a strategy and when I start consistently getting correct I would move to timed practice. I did this for 1 weeks specifically for DM (my worst section) and after the week I managed to increase my percentile from 44th to 82nd in subtests. However, the next day I sat an exam and went back down to 49th percentile in my DM section. What is a good strategy to work towards eliminating these varying results?
 

Fili

Dentist 🦷
Moderator
Hi all, I have been doing a lot of study time on UCAT. My current strategy has been initially doing a test, then spending time reviewing and reflecting/ writing notes on what I could do better or different strategies I could try next time. I will then look at the question types I did worst at, proceed to do untimed practice to develop a strategy and when I start consistently getting correct I would move to timed practice. I did this for 1 weeks specifically for DM (my worst section) and after the week I managed to increase my percentile from 44th to 82nd in subtests. However, the next day I sat an exam and went back down to 49th percentile in my DM section. What is a good strategy to work towards eliminating these varying results?

Do you reckon a possible reason you went down is because you can't keep that same flow you have in subtests than you do for a full exam? Can you consistently get ~80th percentile in those subtests? Because you may have had just a bad test tbh and it will probably change if you do other tests - but if you only managed to get 80th percentile a few times and your average in the most recent weeks was below that, then work towards getting a consistently high average.

Just keep going at it until you're consistent. Take breaks but make sure you work on speed as well as endurance aka being able to keep your focus up for the entire duration of the exam.
 
Quite normal - I very very slowly improved throughout the 3 weeks I did prep for UCAT back in 2019, then two days right before the test, I got some 93rd percentiles on some mocks and did fine on the actual thing.

My advice is to take a break from it for a bit. Like you said, you've been preparing for the last month, and still have all of April, May, June and July to continue preparing. My 2 cents, stop doing UCAT for like 2 weeks and relax. No point burning out and over stressing 4 months before the test.
Thanks a lot for the advice!
 

cherry19

Member
Hiya,
I have my UCAT in August, so I got a couple months left. I have been doing some practice for UCAT over the last month or so. With each of my practice sessions, I have been revising my mistakes and understanding why I got a certain question wrong. I probably spend more time revising then actually doing the question because I get so many wrong haha...

The problem is I have become a bit demotivated because I haven't seen much improvement over the last month. While there has been some very very minor improvements on my other sections, my VR is pretty much the same. Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong? Any advice is much appreciated. Thanks!
I thought I'd share my experience if you don't mind :)

My UCAT is at the end of July and I'd say during the first month of UCAT prep this year, my scores in VR were consistently around low 20s/44. I just kept reviewing the questions (both correct/incorrect) and practising while also improving my speed-reading. Even tho I wasn't seeing much improvement for quite a while... fast forward to now and my scores are consistently 37-40/44 or 99 percentile. Somehow VR is my best section when it clearly used to be my worst. So don't feel let down rn, as long as you keep trying to improve and stay calm throughout the whole process, you'll see a shift in scores sometime soon.
 
I thought I'd share my experience if you don't mind :)

My UCAT is at the end of July and I'd say during the first month of UCAT prep this year, my scores in VR were consistently around low 20s/44. I just kept reviewing the questions (both correct/incorrect) and practising while also improving my speed-reading. Even tho I wasn't seeing much improvement for quite a while... fast forward to now and my scores are consistently 37-40/44 or 99 percentile. Somehow VR is my best section when it clearly used to be my worst. So don't feel let down rn, as long as you keep trying to improve and stay calm throughout the whole process, you'll see a shift in scores sometime soon.
Thanks a lot for this! I will just have to stay patient and keeping working at it (with lots of breaks ofc). Good to hear you're doing so well, good luck in July! :)
 
I thought I'd share my experience if you don't mind :)

My UCAT is at the end of July and I'd say during the first month of UCAT prep this year, my scores in VR were consistently around low 20s/44. I just kept reviewing the questions (both correct/incorrect) and practising while also improving my speed-reading. Even tho I wasn't seeing much improvement for quite a while... fast forward to now and my scores are consistently 37-40/44 or 99 percentile. Somehow VR is my best section when it clearly used to be my worst. So don't feel let down rn, as long as you keep trying to improve and stay calm throughout the whole process, you'll see a shift in scores sometime soon.
Hey,
Just regarding your speed-reading, how did you work on it? Did you use an app or read lots of other materials?

I am also sitting on low 20s out of 44 and I cant seem to improve that. This has been the case for the last month. I have been revising the questions I am getting wrong (and right for that matter) but nothing is changing. I feel like I am doing something wrong lol. When you say you revised the questions, how exactly did you do it? UCAT is approaching fast and I am kinda getting worried haha.

Thanks!
 

cherry19

Member
Hey,
Just regarding your speed-reading, how did you work on it? Did you use an app or read lots of other materials?

I am also sitting on low 20s out of 44 and I cant seem to improve that. This has been the case for the last month. I have been revising the questions I am getting wrong (and right for that matter) but nothing is changing. I feel like I am doing something wrong lol. When you say you revised the questions, how exactly did you do it? UCAT is approaching fast and I am kinda getting worried haha.

Thanks!
Hey :)

I mainly read other materials, particularly historical articles on random websites since the historical passages tend to be the ones I dread doing/was worst at. I've been doing this everyday for a few months now.

For revising questions, I took note of what types of questions I would get wrong which would be the reading comprehension ones usually so I focused more on those rather than T/F/CT. I've also adopted some tricks along the way which I have found to be pretty handy. Like, I noticed that low modal answers are usually easier to prove to be true so I can eliminate the high modal answer options (works most of the time). Also, when there's a question based on dates/other mathematical question in VR, the answer is usually never can't tell. Most of the time, you have to do some simple maths like finding the time difference between 2 dates or some percentage calc. It's a small thing to note but it still helped me improve my marks.

Hope that helps! Good luck for your UCAT prep💪
 

cs123

Member
In the early days, definitely start with the weaker sections because sections like VR can take a while to improve. Don't simply focus on doing practice questions, but also getting the technique of speed reading correct. This can be done through speed reading exercises like reading random tough passages etc. While you can spend less time on stronger sections, don't end up neglecting them. Hope this helps! Good luck :)
VR has been my weakest section from the get go, before exposure to the UCAT I had never read text with such speed!! After a few months of timed practice and mocks I have found little improvement in my VR score despite my better skimming and triaging techniques and this is really concerning me.
I often find I miss a crucial sentence in the text that would have given me the correct answer, but I can't see it being practical to slow down my speed since I am already guessing two sets at the end due to running out of time.
Does anyone have any tips? V much appreciated.
 
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weeknd

Member
VR has been my weakest section from the get go, before exposure to the UCAT I had never read text with such speed!! After a few months of timed practice and mocks I have found little improvement in my VR score despite my better skimming and triaging techniques and this is really concerning me.
I often find I miss a crucial sentence in the text that would have given me the correct answer, but I can't see it being practical to slow down my speed since I am already guessing two sets at the end due to running out of time.
Does anyone have any tips? V much appreciated.
I'm pretty similar to you - I struggle to skim stuff and pick up the 'key words/phrases' (this also happens to be a popular strategy amongst most people taking the ucat so I really thought there was something wrong with me).

Personally I found that reading the passage (just as normal, without skimming) but 'summarising' each paragraph really helped me. This way, after each question, if I needed to I could relate it back to a specific paragraph and then skim it and get the answer.
So basically 1. reading the passage normally will already give you a better overall understanding and 2. remembering what each paragraph is about (just an overview is fine like 1st para. - history, 2nd - early development, 3rd - modern discoveries, and so on).

Also with lists or statistics (anything that is a 'name' or number) don't bother memorising it when you read the passage, just remember where it was so you can refer back to it if needed. For most, it's not even going to be relevant so you can skim over these words.

Hopefully that helps a little bit!
 

angesangles

Member
Ive seen a fair amount of materials of UCAT on sites such as : Coursehero, would that be a bit of an overview of to what type of materials are offered in the actual UCAT exam.

Not sure if that relates specifically to my thread. For me I've always enjoyed reading especially the last 4-5 years.

To be able to read critically under pressure in an exam is another thing all together.
 

r1ckworthy

Bachelor of Physiotherapy @ ACU
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!
 
Here are some tips I picked up from my Medic Mind 1-1 Tutoring (really helpful btw would recommend!)

VR - Don't flag questions - If you think about it, flagging a question and coming back to it means you have to read the whole passage again so you may as well try and spend time answering the question there and then.

AR - Learn the common triggers and use SPONCS (Shape, Position, Orientation, Number, Colour and Symmetry)

QR - Use estimation as much as possible - There's no chance you can work everything out in the short amount of time you have so use estimates whenever you can

SJT - Treat each response independently. Don't think you have to order them in terms of most appropriate to least appropriate as two options could be very appropriate things to do.

DM - There are 6 main question types so become familiar with them. Recap your probability knowledge, learn the syllogisms rules for DM (theres a good video on MM's youtube channel), use the whiteboard! Can't stress this enough in my practice that for all the riddles ihave to write the info down to make it easy to understand.

Hope that all helps! Please DM me if you want some more tips :) My second year doing the UCAT (last year I used medentry which was awful and they just recycled their UMAT materials but medic mind and other uk companies seem more experienced!)
Hey man, im planning on sitting the UCAT. How do I dm you?
 

ucatking

Member
For those sitting the UCAT this year, I just have some advice in terms of resources because I know there can be an overwhelming amount!

There are going to be TONS of UCAT material out there, and honestly even if you complete ALL of them, the UCAT is a type of test that doesn't guarantee any marks. I know people who have completed 50+ mock tests and bombed the test, but also people did not even do any mock tests and aced it.

My advice for people is to stick one reliable resource and also invest on a UCAT mentor! An expert who can guide you through specific thought processes, as well as useful tips and tricks. This way you won't be overwhelmed with questions (which isn't the goal of the UCAT), but you focus more on honing your skills in UCAT.

If you'd like some recommendations on some really successful UCAT mentors please DM me :) Also if you'd like any general tips or tricks

Hopefully this helps people,
 
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peanut✿

Member
Hey, not too sure where to post this but just wondering if anyone could give me some advice about what to use for UCAT preparation? Thanks :)
 

fifo

Lurker
Hey hey, I think there are at least 3 great online course/platforms. Too scared to mention the names here. I've tried two of them and finding not necessarily good to go with one with 1000000000 questions. I want quality over quantity. Will choose one to go premium.
 

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