Hi guys. I'm a student in year 12 and I'm really determined to get into medicine. I've enrolled in MedEntry and I've been doing drills, but I've just been getting bad scores in all sections especially in problem solving where I just totally hit a wall. The advice given to me at my MedEntry lecture was: do more. What's the point of doing more if I am going back to the drills doing the same things wrong. I try to come back each time trying not to give up and to persevere but end up with the same result. Can anyone give me advice on how to approach the UMAT and improve properly in the 6 months till UMAT? In my opinion I am an average but very hard working student and I topped half of my subjects in Year 11 at my school. I'm just hoping that my work ethic will allow me to improve in UMAT as well. can anyone help me?
I can give you advice for section 1 and 2 coz i got 91st and 89th percentile respectively, but section 3 i need to figure out myself (lul 47th percentile).
for section 2 - don't answer what you think is right. As stupid and pointless as this sounds, trust me. Answer what you believe is the nicest most empathetic answer. Learn how to read quickly because there may be many super long passages. Section 2 does sorta depend on your mood that day. I spent the night before umat just chillin, talking to some friends, and although i was nervous i tried to forget umat. The next morning i went to umat with some friends after a good night's sleep, tried to keep as calm and chill as possible, and did section 2 first. This essentially worked out for me. But yeah best thing with section 2 is answer the way they want you to answer, not what you think is right - this needs practice. Get some reading done this year, learn new words, because vocabulary may be difficult in section 2. Read some books about everyday life issues - try a long way down by nick hornby, it may not be the best literary work, but it can help you empathise better i guess, and other books as such.
for section 1 it's all about skill. They'll give you heaps of info and you're going to have to interpret a whole bunch of junk, where you essentially probably only need about 3% of that info. You'll need to practise using tables, flowcharts, diagrams and what not. You'll see this in many of medentry's solutions. Try taking their skills and methods and use them for questions you come across. You can practise this without even doing any umat questions. When you're doing study notes etc, try getting big blocks of info and making them into flowcharts, timelines, tables, diagrams etc. Section 1 also requires a lot of concentration.
As for section 3, i need help myself HAHA.
EDIT: Oh and don't be so disappointed with your drills percentiles and what not. They were very inaccurate for me personally. All my percentiles were way below 30 for every exam in MedEntry. In the end I got 79th, and even though that wasn't good enough for med, my point is the percentiles aren't something you can rely on. Don't feel too disheartened - compare results with friends instead to see if you're improving
