A Silly Introduction
It's too bad that Hermione decided not to be a Healer and we never got to find out what the wizarding equivalent of the UKCAT and BMAT are - then I could have made an actually relevant reference to Harry Potter for my title. Even Snape is disappoint:
Anyways, UKCAT and BMAT. If you want to study medicine in the UK, you will have to take at least one of these if you want much choice in which medical schools you apply to. I'm not going to list which universities do /don't use them, because you'll want the most up-to-date information so you need to go onto the universities own websites, but I am going to dish out a bit of advice as someone who's been there and come out the other side. This was meant to be one post, but to stop it being ridiculously long, I'll start with the UKCAT and put the BMAT one up later next.
Firstly register (and pay the entry fee) in time - you can register for the UKCAT from the 1st May. You don't need to do it then, but be sure to leave plenty of time, because if all the testing appointments get booked and you haven't got one then you won't be able to take it for that application cycle (i.e. year). When booking, remember you can only take the test once each cycle, so you want to give yourself plenty of time to prepare. I took mine during the Summer holidays so I had plenty of free time to both to prepare and to consider my options in light of my result (see next section).
According to the UKCAT website it cannot be revised for. Admittedly you can't learn facts to regurgitate for it, but you definitely can (and should) prepare! It has 4 sections:
- Verbal Reasoning
- Quantitative Reasoning (i.e. maths)
- Abstract Reasoning
- Decision Analysis
Each of these will give you a score scaled to a mark out of 900, and the average candidate is supposed to get 600. There used to be a 'non-cognitive analysis' section, (which was supposed to assess you character and suitability to a career in medicine/dentistry), which you might find mentioned in older books, but your test won't include it. The key here is being able to answer as many of the questions correctly and within the time as possible. This is extremely unlikely to be all of them. If there's a particular section you're weak at, then you can make up for it with the others, as it is your overall average score that counts.
The book I found most helpful for this was 'Get Into Medical School 600 UKCAT Practice Questions' because really you just need to do lots of practice questions and get used to the style and find techniques to help you answer very quickly. A quick warning about this book - I found the actual test (particularly the maths section) quite a lot easier than a lot of the questions in here. However, the questions you get are picked at random from a large database for each section, so you could get all the hard ones. If you've got friends who are also applying then you could always club together to buy books, maximising the number of practice questions available to you all.
There are specimen papers available on the UKCAT website, which have the advantage of being computer-based, like the real test, so they get you used to using an onscreen calculator. Your testing centre will probably also provide you with a whiteboard (and pen XD!), so get used to writing you workings out neatly (so that you don't need to waste time wiping your board while you're in a timed section), but don't worry, you will be allowed to jot things down!
There are preparation courses available (at a cost). I didn't use any personally (and did well) and I feel that the main benefit would be additional practice which you can get much more cheaply from books or free from the UKCAT website. However, since I didn't use any I can't really comment on how useful I would have found them.
Also, don't let you preparation demoralise you. I was really struggling to get up to the 600 (average) UKCAT mark on the practice tests I did, but did much better on the day.
Time for a cute kitteh break:
Being Strategic With Your Score
For the UKCAT you know your score before you send off you UCAS form. This means that it would be very stupid indeed to apply to somewhere which uses a particular cut-off, knowing that your score is below it. You have not spent a huge amount of time perfecting you application for some admissions tutor to take one look at your UKCAT score and throw your form away.
However, most medical schools will look at your score in context and you can generally find out from their websites how much weight they give it. So if you have a weak UKCAT, but strong A Level predictions, a good Personal Statement and reference and you interview well, then you probably still have a good shot at most of the UKCAT schools, but pick from ones that don't put a huge emphasis on your score. Likewise, if your score was very high and you know that another area of your application isn't, then use you score to your advantage.
Obviously you should be applying to medical schools that you like and would want to go to, rather than just the ones you think will be easiest to get into, but remember to be realistic. You do have 4 choices to put on the UCAS form, so although this is only 4 and you shouldn't throw any away, it is still 4 and you can spread your bets.
And Finally...
Good luck! And remember to relax on the day! Getting a bad score isn't the end of the world and won't mean that you can't become a doctor, there are medical schools that don't use it at all, don't use it much, or use the BMAT instead.
Also, silver lining here: it caused me to write this blog post which led to Word learning Snape's name.
