The UK Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT) is designed to help universities make better choices amongst their dental and medical course applicants. It helps to ensure that the candidates chosen for these courses have the right level of professionalism, integrity and aptitude to succeed on the programme, and go on to become a doctor, dentist or medical practitioner.
As you can imagine, the UKCAT is extremely hard to pass. In order to ensure that only the best candidates are given a place, the questions in the assessment will push you to your limits, and the fail percentage of candidates is fairly high. In this blog, we’ll look at the top list of mistakes that UKCAT candidates make, and how you can avoid them!
UKCAT MISTAKE 1: Spending too much time on one question
The UKCAT assessors don’t just want to see how many questions you can get right. They want to see how many questions you can get right within the assessment timeframe. You’ll be under intense time pressure during the UKCAT, and this means that the quality of your answers will be stringently assessed. The candidates who score the highest on the most questions will be successful, not the candidates who can answer the most questions alone. If you can’t work out the answer to a particular question, don’t waste time. Go back to it later.
UKCAT MISTAKE 2: Trying to understand numerical data
This is just a waste of time. Your main priority should be in picking out the key pieces of information from the passage. You don’t need to look at irrelevant pieces of information. Some of the data is designed to throw you off, and make you start doing incorrect or unnecessary calculations. Wasted time will cost you severely.
UKCAT MISTAKE 3: Not using the examples.
When taking the UKCAT Decision Analysis test, it is really important to spend at least a minute of your time looking over the pre-supplied examples. Only by doing this, will you understand how to apply the rules of the test. You’d be shocked by the sheer number of candidates who ignore these examples altogether, and jump straight into the assessment. This is a big mistake! The examples illustrate how codes and other rules apply in questions, so you’d be a fool not to use them.
UKCAT MISTAKE 4: Not familiarising yourself with the UKCAT software
The UKCAT test will be taken online. This means that you’ll be using a specific platform to take the assessment, which you will need to familiarise yourself with before you take the exam. In order to get the best results, you need to be comfortable with the software you are using. Imagine if you’d never used a pen before. Now imagine that right before an exam, someone handed you a pen and said ‘take the whole exam using this’. You’d be confused and lost. The more familiar you are with the software, the less likely you are to panic or freeze up.
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