How I Prepared for the UMAT (And how I learnt the hard way that you should!)

I had always wanted to pursue medicine. In fact, I never even really considered the possibility of anything else, or the prospect of not getting in straight after high school. I knew I had to do well at school, so I worked hard, and then I knew that they had this entry exam that according to people in years above me ‘you couldn’t really study for’. GREAT I thought! I’ll just keep studying for my HSC® Exam and once I’ve done really well in that, the interview will be a breeze and I’ll go straight into my dream career.

If I could go back and slap 2012 Sarah across the head, I would because maybe that would have made the difference between spending a year doing a course I had no interest in pursuing as a career and actually starting to work towards one day being a doctor. In 2012, I prepared by going through the practice papers ACER provided and going through some of the questions with friends. I also made a short vocabulary list and started reading a little bit more. And while all these things are good things to do, it’s not enough if you want to be competitive for entry into medicine. This kind of preparation scored me in the 72nd percentile.

So after one failed attempt and with the stress of not knowing what was in my future weighing me down, I took control and this is where you should start paying attention. I, like you, started researching online resources and blogs from people who had been successful, trying to pick up hints and tricks on how to prepare myself to the absolute best of my ability. I should also mention that I was not alone in this endeavor, I had a couple of friends from high school who like me had not been successful in the previous year and this is important. Everything is so much easier when you’re in it together, so if you know someone who also wants the same thing as you, start your preparation by forming a study group.

We (me and my study group) decided to enrol in a UMAT® Exam preparation course that offered live teaching, an MCQ bank with online exams and a live UMAT® exam. I decided to start slow and work my way into hardcore study. By this time in 2013, with 4 months left til exam day I was spending at least one or two full days a week committed to UMAT® Exam study. On one of those days, I set 3 hours aside and would complete a full online exam each week under strict UMAT® Exam conditions; no music, no notes and no interruptions. By doing this, I was so accustomed to sitting for 3 hour periods that by the time the UMAT® Exam came around, I knew exactly what to expect. I knew exactly how long I had for each question, how to best tackle questions I was unsure about, when to move on if I didn’t know the answer and how to best cope with long passages and readings. Because I was doing this in a group, this also meant that we could meet up every second week and talk about any questions or skills that we were having trouble with. By doing this, we were consolidating everything we had done and all the skills we had learnt so that when we next had to apply them, we were well prepared.

In addition to this rigorous study each week, there were other more subtle things that I started doing to improve my abilities to perform well in each section. I started by working on that small vocabulary list that I made in 2012 and turned it into a big vocabulary list to ensure I didn’t lose any marks from not knowing what a word means and I pinned it up on my wall and would read through this regularly. I practiced speed reading, because I knew that I was a slow reader and from practicing with the online exams, I could see that my reading was slowing me down and
sometimes I would run out of time (another benefit to come out of doing online practice exams under exam conditions!).

In the week leading up to the exam, I was so focused on my goal that I had done everything I possibly could and decided that calming myself was more important than trying to seek out more information. I read through my vocabulary list a few times, did some skill question sets online and with a week to go before exam day, I completed the ACER practice UMAT® exam. It’s a good idea to save this to the end to see how you’re going. Remember that this exam generally doesn’t change year to year but the UMAT® Exam always does so often it is not a good reflection of your UMAT® Exam abilities.

This might sound like a lot of additional hard work but realistically, if you can commit 1-2 days in each week, you have the rest of the week to focus on your school and yourself and once you set yourself a good routine, it doesn’t feel that hard. If you start preparing early, it means that as the exam nears closer, you don’t have added stress because you’ve already done the work and just need to work consistently. And if you can do this successfully, like me, you could be looking at a score in the 99th percentile.

My best advice to you is if you haven’t started studying, start now, and if you have, work consistently and don’t let UMAT® Exam overwhelm you! Stay calm, stay focused and good luck.