UCAT? (1 Viewer)

[Average Boreduser]

The number doesn’t really make all that much difference - all the students in the top schools have already been sitting it for the past two decades. Now there are more selective & independent schools and everyone in these schools also sit it, but the top thousand students are the ‘real competition’ if we are to use such terms.

Number of students will definately make a difference. More students= more students trying to compete against each other to achieve 'top thousand' rank.

 

[Eagle Mum]

Unfortunately, unless one is quite talented I think it is now increasingly difficult to do well enough in the UCAT without any effort.

I’m not suggesting no preparation effort should be made (my eldest went through the three practice papers that were made available by the UMAT organisers so that she knew what to expect), but several years of extensive coaching shouldn’t be required for what is intended to be an aptitude test.

 

[Average Boreduser]

I’m not suggesting no preparation effort should be made (my eldest went through the three practice papers that were made available by the UMAT organisers so that she knew what to expect), but several years of extensive coaching shouldn’t be required for what is intended to be an aptitude test.

Your eldest did the UMAT that puts more emphasis on non-academic attributes and is in paper format (hence less preparation materials that what the UCAT currently offers from third party websites- therefore less experience for students- therefore less of a barrier between students who prepped lots and those who have done not particularly as much). UCAT on the other hand is online and focuses on aptitude and skills of a participant and possesses a much larger platform for resources as it is online and is also used in the UK (hence, more resources are available due to more demand)

 

[carrotsss]

I’m not suggesting no preparation effort should be made (my eldest went through the three practice papers that were made available by the UMAT organisers so that she knew what to expect), but several years of extensive coaching shouldn’t be required for what is intended to be an aptitude test.

Yeah, completely agree with that

 

[Average Boreduser]

Yeah fair point.

 

[Eagle Mum]

14000 students did the UCAT in 2022, nearly a 400% increase since 2015

I meant that the competition is changing in the sense that people are on average getting better at it, not that there’s more people doing it

As most students know, it’s not just medical students who sit these UCAT exams but also those applying for dentistry and some of the other allied health degrees. What is less well known is that, because there’s no restriction on who sits these exams, there are a whole lot of other people sitting theses exams for reasons other than uni applications, including medical students (already in med schools) and even young doctors who are paid by coaching colleges to sit the exams for the purposes of accessing the question bank and even specialist doctors who sit it so they have an idea of what their high school kids can expect and they can help prepare them, since the previous generation of doctors didn’t sit UMAT/UCAT exams. My husband & I have even jokingly discussed sitting it to see who gets the higher score.

The organisers don’t restrict or monitor who sits the exam because medical students have to sit it if they want to transfer to another med school and there are some mature age individuals who decide that they want to try studying medicine. Let’s face it, at $300 per application, the organisers reap over $4M for a single day event. Therefore, the statistics on the percentiles required to get into each med school is unpredictably skewed by these ‘ring in’ candidates.