5 essential habits for acing the UMAT

With the 2018 UMAT just months away, it’s time to start seriously preparing for the exam. Here are five habits that you can start working on right away to ensure that you do your best.

 

1. Getting Organised

Benjamin Franklin once (supposedly) said that “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”.

So, get planning! First, pencil in the UCAT exam (which is on 25th July in 2018) into your calendar, diary or planner. Make sure you have a good understanding and overview of the UMAT. Then, schedule out specific times every week where you’ll be doing some UMAT study. Make sure to also jot down what you plan on achieving in each study session (i.e. finish 40 section 1 MCQs and check feedback). Creating a schedule like this minimizes your chances of procrastination, especially if you also schedule your breaks. It also ensures that you are consistently studying for the UMAT, making it much more likely for you to do well in the exam. If you’re looking for a simple tool to start planning, I would strongly recommend Google Calendar. I’ve been using it to plan my life since high school and have found it to be invaluable in keeping track of everything.

 

2. Building your Focus

The focus is an underrated skill when it comes to the UMAT. We all know that being focused on a single task is an ideal way to finish it quickly and effectively. So, one of the best ways to prepare for the UMAT would be to build your focus. How do you ask? Stop multitasking and eliminate all distractions from your study space. This includes your phone as well as having ‘distracting’ tabs open on your computers, such as YouTube and Facebook. By focusing on one task at a time, you’ll find yourself becoming better at processing information quickly. And as you do this more and more, you’ll also find that you are able to focus for longer periods of time. This is particularly useful for the UMAT or any other time pressured exam. And talking about time, let’s move on to the next important habit.

 

3. Managing your Time

Time management is another skill that is extremely useful for the UMAT. As mentioned earlier, the UMAT is an exam with a time pressure. You have 3 hours (and 10 minutes of reading time) to complete 134 questions. That’s approximately 1 minute and 20 seconds per question, which isn’t a whole lot. My advice would be to spend the 10 minutes of reading time to complete as many questions as possible. I would then work through the rest of the questions, checking my progress every hour. I would aim to finish about 45 questions every hour. Remember not to spend too much time on one question either. If you’re not sure of the answer, take an educated guess and move on. I found that I didn’t really have time to check my answers during the actual exam.

 

4. Staying Physically and Mentally Fit

With all your schoolwork and UMAT preparation in these coming months, it is important not to let academics consume your life either. Studying all the time isn’t wise as you can neglect your nutrition, exercise, and sleep. As a result, you could become stressed, depressed and anxious, which will eventually lead to burning out and being unmotivated to keep working. Remember to pace yourself and take breaks from time to time! Also make sure to have time for friends, family, and other extracurricular activities.

 

5. Learning from your Mistakes

And my final piece of advice is to actively self-reflect and learn from your mistakes. It’s time for another great quote!

As Winston Churchill said, “Those who fail to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”

The best way to rapidly improve your UMAT performance is to spend time after each test or study session looking at the mistakes you have made and determining why you made them.  The multiple-choice questions offered by GradReady have step by step explanations as to how they answered each question. Use these to your advantage. Looking at this feedback is a great way to minimize your chances of repeating the same mistakes and thus, is an effective way to quickly improve your UMAT score.

And that’s it! Work on these five habits during your UMAT preparation and watch your scores improve!