4 Quick Things You Can Do To Enhance Your UMAT Study

Studying for the UCAT Exam is unlike studying for any other typical high school test. There are no teachers, there aren’t any guidelines or study guides for you to follow. Therefore, you need to look at alternative strategies to improve the skills required to do well. Here are my top 4 things that helped me prepare for the UCAT® Exam.

 

Study consistently

Throughout high school most students fall into the ritual of chilling until maybe a couple days before the exam, then cramming the content. While that may have worked for you for most knowledge based exams, this is a terrible idea for the UMAT® Exam. In the UMAT® Exam, there is no knowledge to memorise and check if you know. Instead, what is tested is your ability to analyse text and think logically. These skills can only be developed over time and through consistent practice.

What I found useful was setting aside around 20 minutes each day to do practice questions. I would also spend 3 hours every Friday doing a practice exam, and 2 hours on Saturday and Sunday going over the practice exam to check my mistakes

 

Learn what skills you lack

When going over your practice exam your mark can be a good indication of how you are travelling. However, it is much more important to create a bank of the questions you tend to get wrong. A lot of the time, you will notice that you tend to get certain types of questions wrong, such as true or false, dialogues, or pick the middle questions. Once you know which types of questions you have difficulty with, you can focus on developing your own method of figuring out the answer, or else you can explore on online forums to see if anyone else has good strategies that you can use.

 

When reviewing questions and exams, try not to rely on the explanation

When going over your practice exams and questions, it is tempting to read the solution and go “oh I see, I’ll remember that next time”. It is often the journey rather than the destination that is more important. Something I did that I believe helped me immensely was once I had finished correcting my exams (without reading the explanations), I would go over each of the questions I had answered incorrectly and try to work out the answer without checking the solutions. This allows you to work on the questions without time pressure, and by doing so achieves two things. Firstly, you get a real sense for how long it would usually take you to work out a particular question. Secondly, you get a chance to develop techniques that will aid you when approaching similar questions in the future.

 

Read the full text, don’t just skim through it

As tempting as it is to just skim through the long Logical Reasoning passages, it is actually a very good exercise to train yourself to concentrate for long periods of time. Reading and analysing large blocks of text for a good part of 3 hours is extremely tough and therefore it is important that you develop the knack for this early on in your preparation. Practice questions aren’t the only source of practice for this skill – reading the newspaper everyday as well as reading story books and journal articles will all hone your ability to read and analyse complex texts.

 

Stay tuned for the next UMAT® Exam blog where we discuss more tips and tricks for your UMAT® Exam preparation!