GAMSAT Tutors: Are they really worth it?

Whether to employ a tutor to assist your preparation for the GAMSAT is a tough choice. On the one hand, you have a difficult and novel examination that puts you in direct conflict with other highly motivated and capable individuals, and on the other, you have the often-considerable financial costs of a tutor as well as the risk of employing someone whose methodologies don’t mesh well with your style.

This conundrum is understandable, however, if we look at it rationally there are a number of sound arguments in favor of employing a GAMSAT tutor.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the GAMSAT is inherently competitive. Your primary concern in this examination is not passing, but in fact, beating out any number of other people for a limited number of places in the top end of the distribution curve and achieving a top GAMSAT Score. As such, you would only be doing yourself a disservice to not give yourself every advantage possible in securing one of these places. A tutor is one such way to secure these advantages.

The first thing to be mindful of is that, with a few exceptions, most people have only had at most two or three years of experience concerning the GAMSAT, including preparation, sitting the test and methodologies, and at best, these people are often preoccupied with other occupations and so their attention is divided. A tutor who focuses on the GAMSAT has an obvious advantage. If they have been practicing for some time, they have simply had more time to spend in thought and practice in preparing for the GAMSAT as well as likely having gone through it themselves. Additionally, as this is their occupation, the preparation for this test has been a primary subject of their attention. This advantage of time and focused attention will simply by probability produce insights and rigorous methods produced by longitudinal trial and error. By employing a GAMSAT tutor, you will be able to take advantage of many years worth of insights in the limited time you have available to prepare for the examination.

This time and focused attention are further compounded by the number of students a given tutor has worked with. Everyone inevitably brings their own approach to preparing for the GAMSAT. A wise tutor will make careful note of these approaches to expand their repertoire of techniques. You yourself would end up adding to their toolbox of perspectives and ideas. The benefit of this is that not only has the tutor collected their own insights over the time they have invested in tutoring the GAMSAT, but also those of any other number of individuals. This will mean that you will have a myriad of ideas at your disposal and that if one methodology is not working for you, there is every capacity to try a different one.

Perhaps another key point is that often tutors will have sat and been successful at the GAMSAT themselves, as this is what would likely qualify them to tutor. This obviously immediately lends them value. This means the tutor is in the position you want to be. Their ideas clearly should have significance as they have used them to achieve the very same goal that you are hoping to achieve. This makes a tutor an individual worthy of emulation. You can only benefit from spending time with such an individual.

The final reason is a purely economic argument. The fact is, if you are successful, you will enter into training for a profession that is ultimately financially lucrative. By the time you are a full doctor you will have long forgotten the cost of any tutoring you employed and will have made it back any number of times. In this sense, the only rational decision is to give yourself every possible advantage and opportunity to get a tutor or enroll in a GAMSAT Preparation Course.