Why you should start UMAT prep early

You will hear time and time again that the UCAT is not one that you can cram for. You may even hear of a few people who managed to do well in the UMAT without studying extensively. I’m not sure I really trust many of these stories to be true, but even in these rare cases where people did well without too much prep, they were almost always already somehow familiar with the type of testing used in the UMAT. The bottom line is: if you are trying to familiarise yourself with the exam and become proficient at quickly handling the problems, you will need to prepare for the UMAT.

One of the main reasons you’ll want to start your UMAT prep early (aside from the obvious “you’ll have more time”) is that you will be able to build your UMAT practice into your routine, making it habitual. Why is this important? Habits are by nature things you’ll end up finding yourself easily doing without particular much effort required to initiate. So how do you build this habit up? At first, you should start with smaller tasks, but do them often. For example, you might want to go through 10 practice questions per day but do so every day. If you do this early on, say, even for just two months straight, you’ll have covered 600 questions or so, easily more than the number you can expect to encounter in the test itself. You can achieve this much more effortlessly by building up that habit of doing a small number of questions every day! Now imagine what you could do if you bumped that number up to 20 or 40 questions a day?

It’s all well and good to decide to start with a small number and work your way up, however, you’ll find that similar to New Year’s Resolutions, you often will struggle to keep at it. There are ways to tackle this, however, through motivating yourself. One is to use some sort of tracker, such as apps like HabitBull, which can track good and bad habits and visualize your streaks. It’s a bit like having a Fitbit or a run-tracker app, only for studying! The longer you maintain a habit, the longer the streak. People are very prone to perceive keeping up the streak as more satisfying than simply completing a task.

Other ways you can motivate yourself is to tie in some reward for completing each day’s set of questions. This reward could be something like television time, gaming or time to hang out with friends; literally anything you feel like. That kind of positive reinforcement really works but it’s really no different than training a dog or a small child: it will take time to implement and you might have occasional lapses in your routine at the start, but once you get into it, your productivity will shoot up. So don’t waste any more time: get started now!