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HELP NEEDED for UMAT! PLEASE~ (1 Viewer)

Mass_potato

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Hi guyz!

I am sitting for UMAT again this year, and I really wish that I could ace UMAT this time to get into medicine,but from my previous UMAT score, I am not so confident in myself ( 2 out of 3 sections <50) :(

Does anyone here have any useful tips or prep strategies for UMAT? How should I best prepare for each section? read more novels of a particular kind or practice doing nonverbal reasoning from puzzle books?

Does anyone mind to share their personal experience of preparing and acing UMAT?

REALLY REALLY appreciate your help!! ^^
 

ElleWhy

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@Mass_potato Hey, I was in the same position as you last year. What worked for me was to completely change my approach to preparing for the UMAT. I did heaps of practice papers the first time round and it ended up stressing me out and I got under 50 percentile. But last year I read heaps of books, did around 7 practice papers only and went through each question, making sure I understood how I got the answers. This strategy might not work for you but I'm just throwing it out there :)
 

redjnr

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Section I: Some will of course be more gifted than others and find it easier to deduce / rationalise solutions, but overall with practice and understanding when doing practice questions (as ElleWhy says) I think you definitely can improve. For the first section what helped me the most was being able to keep calm and focused so as to process the information in an efficient manner.

Section II: IMO there's really not much you can do for section II, it seems to be largely based on talent. I would still advise doing practice questions to become familiar with the style and also definitely REVISING OR LEARNING VOCAB (there was a lot of difficult vocab in 2014). But yes I knew friends who did 10+ papers, but failed to get past 50, and conversely friends who did UMAT "for fun" and scored 90th percentile. Personally I did do 15 or so hours of UMAT study, and never really felt more confident in Section 2. Perhaps reading novels will help and it's definitely worth trying.

Section III: PRACTICE WILL MAKE YOU BETTER. Becoming familiar and quick at identifying patterns (many of which are just rotations in some order, like 1 left then 2 left then 3 left etc...) will allow you to also save more time for other sections - complete as many UMAT Section III questions as you can get. BTW I skipped all the pick the middle in the sequence and just came back to them at the end.

Another big tip is to not lose track of time. No need to be fanatic, just ensure when you have finished 1/4 of the questions, only 1/4 of the exam has passed e.t.c. and take into account any skipped questions (e.g. pick the middle)
 

Boydals

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@Mass_potato - I'm going to sit it this year as well, shall we study buddy :)
 

iStudent

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Work on increasing the speed at which you do questions. Especially with S3 - aim to complete the easy questions in under 30 seconds (if you can do this, you should be able to complete the paper)
 

photastic

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Only did well for section 2 but I simply analysed human behaviour when watching press conferences or news articles tbh.
 

hayabusaboston

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I always wondered, what is minimum score in UMAT to even be considered for med place? like say at UWS or something.


Cos GAMSAT is like 50th percentile LOL
 

redjnr

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Well the minimum UMAT score at UNSW to be considered for an interview is 150 overall... Which is like 50th percentile.

But you'd probably have to get 99.95 and be Rural level 5
 

Queenroot

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I always wondered, what is minimum score in UMAT to even be considered for med place? like say at UWS or something.


Cos GAMSAT is like 50th percentile LOL
Yeah the threshold is around 50th percentile for UMAT. However everyone passes that so you can expect it to be 90 - 95th percentile
 

iStudent

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Well the minimum UMAT score at UNSW to be considered for an interview is 150 overall... Which is like 50th percentile.

But you'd probably have to get 99.95 and be Rural level 5
JMP is too! (provided you're a rural student). 50-50-50, along with around 94 ATAR. Then they just look at your interviews (interviews account for 100%).
 

medicinestudent

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to the people who've done their UMAT!!!

I started using the Matrix umat practice papers from 2011 - 2015 the other day because they've got solutions to them but I really wonder how relevant it is to the actual umat papers (is the actual one harder or really different or something?)
 

harrylim5

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I personally reckon it's not about how much you practice, but rather how you approach the different styles of questions. I started working on umat practice questions only days before the actual test itself, but still did pretty well. Learning how to recognise the recurring patterns for section 3 is crucial. As for section 1, i think it's more of a lifelong thing, as you can't really boost your iq in a week or two, but learning how to extract important bits of info can be important in this part. Section 2 is a either you pick all the correct answers, or you pick all the wrong ones type of question, but try analysing the acer practice papers and that should help. Finally, would like to wish you all the best and good luck in getting into med :)
 

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