What is the UMAT? What does it do?

We know that the UMAT is an important test that determines our ability to gain entry into courses such as medicine, optometry and dentistry; but besides that, what do we really know about the UMAT? Why do we have to do it? Why not just use Academic Merit and an interview to select medical students? It is a test that is most probably unlike any other test you’ve had to do to date, consisting of puzzles, graphs, emotional passages and riddles, and explaining this to people can leave a lot of blank faces. Why does a medical student have to be good at puzzles and riddles? Well, although at the surface it might seem silly and just a good way to see if someone is actually keen to do medicine (Because why would you sit a 3 hour exam on this stuff if you weren’t), it is actually assessing a lot more than what it presents at face value.  

 

The UCAT stands for ‘University Clinical Aptitude Test’ which gives us two bit of information. Firstly, it is only for entry into an undergraduate course so if you’re looking at applying for postgraduate medicine, you should scoot on over to Claire’s blog by clicking here to learn more about the GAMSAT. Secondly, it’s for admission into medicine and health sciences such as dentistry and optometry. Beyond this, it's up to us to navigate the matrix of UMAT and work out exactly why we have to do it and what does it do that makes it so important in selecting high yield students?

 

The UMAT is an aptitude test, meaning that it is designed to determine your ability in a particular skill or field of knowledge. Specifically to the UMAT this is testing your ability to use critical thinking and problem solving, your ability to understand emotion in people and finally, your skills in using abstract thinking to work through non-verbal questions and reason out a logical answer. This is broken down into 3 sections and different universities consider different sections to be more or less valuable. For example, at The University of Newcastle, a higher score in section 1 ‘logical reasoning’ will increase your chance of acceptance than a higher score in section 3 ‘non verbal reasoning’. The whole basis of UMAT is that it is designed to test key skills and attributes that are considered important in the medical and health science professions and to your prior study. It does not require any knowledge that you’ve acquired throughout your schooling life because this is tested in your ATAR, so don’t ever let anyone tell you they didn’t do well in the UMAT because they’re not that ‘smart at school’ -  Anyone who has developed skills in thinking logically using abstract thought can excel at the UMAT.

 

So we’ve covered the basics of the UMAT and generally why we have it. It makes sense to make sure that someone who will be a doctor one day will not just be good at school but will have other attributes suited to the job right? Dealing with patients is only 95% of the job anyway hey. So let's break it down section-by-section and look at why the UMAT is the way it is, and what exactly they’re trying to do to extract the best students to move into health science and medicine.

 

Section 1 is the logical reasoning and problem solving sections. As a doctor, you will have to look at pathology results; trends in vital signs and you will be given a list of symptoms and will have to conclude on a diagnosis. To do this, you have to be able to comprehend the information in a sensible way, identify the relevant facts from this information and evaluate it at the highest level and then generate a plausible hypothesis before drawing logical conclusions that could impact someone else’s life. This is essentially the brief for section 1, they want you to think like a practicing doctor and make sure that the person they are choosing for the job will think through their decisions before acting. There will be plenty of times when you will be problem solving in medicine, so when you’re sitting in the exam and a question comes up that sounds similar to ‘Jim is a Tim, but Tim is only sometimes a Sim’, remember that the same logic you use to answer this questions will one day be used to manage someone’s disease.

 

Section 2 it the understanding people section, which is generally the most straightforward. Additionally to being able to learn hard subjects such as science and maths, they want to know how well you can read a situation. In practice, as you deliver good or bad news to your patients, you will constantly be expected to understand people's emotions and reactions and react appropriately. Understanding is just the first step, so in order to enter the next phase of reacting (which you will learn in medical school), the UMAT assesses your ability to understand people.

 

Finally, section 3 is the non-verbal reasoning section, the section where everyone looks at you confused and says ‘you have to be good at puzzles to get into medicine?’. In fact, you do have to be good at puzzles to be a good doctor.  You have hundreds of diseases, some common, some rare, some chronic and some that need treatment immediately, and you have to sort through a sea of knowledge on the patient and these thousands of disease possibilities to come to an accurate diagnosis. So in a way, the UMAT is just a clever way to test your ability to see patterns in disease and patient behaviour. Questions such as next in series questions present a series of 4 images and you have to find the pattern to find the 5th and final frame from a group of 5 options. In real life, you may have a patient with 4 presentations that form a pattern, you then use abstract thought to narrow it down to 5 possible diseases and order tests to solve the puzzle. See, not all that far from reality.

 

So although it seems that the UMAT is a test you ‘can’t prepare for’ and just tests random stuff like puzzles and riddles, you should be thinking about the bigger picture. You wouldn’t have to do it if it were pointless, so if you’ve read through this and are still wondering why they make you do the UMAT, really think about why you’re pursuing medicine, because the skills you use in the UMAT are the same skills you will be using every day as a doctor.  Everyone can do it, you just need to prepare and motivate yourself to excel!