5 Reasons to sit the UCAT Mock Exam Day!

Are you worried about your UCAT score? There’s a lot riding on it. It will help determine if you get into a Medicine or dentistry degree and which Universities will take you. But don’t stress, sitting the FREE UCAT Mock Exam Day (UCAT M.E.D.) will help you prep and get experience so you can slay on exam day! Read on to learn 5 reasons to sit the UCAT M.E.D.

What is the UCAT MED?

The UCAT Mock Exam Day (UCAT MED) is a FREE online UCAT trial exam open to anyone worldwide. It’s as close as we can get you to a real UCAT exam. We run the UCAT M.E.D. globally, so when we calculate and scale the results you get an accurate prediction of your position relative to other candidates.

5 reasons to sit the UCAT MED

Now you know what the UCAT MED is, you need to know how it will help you increase your UCAT score.

1. Exam Experience

The UCAT MED gives you UCAT experience. The UCAT Masterclass exam simulator is an accurate simulation of what the UCAT experience is on exam day.

One of the hardest parts of exam preparation is getting accurate exam practice.

Having the opportunity to sit a timed test under realistic conditions with keyboard shortcuts and an onscreen calculator will give you the opportunity to understand how you will react to the stress of the real thing.

Sitting a mock exam that is timed and marked will help you:

• Understand what the challenges of the whole exam are
• See which sections are the most stressful under timed conditions
• See which keyboard shortcuts are most beneficial
• Get experience using the onscreen calculator under pressure
• Learn to keep yourself calm when time starts running out

The UCAT is meant to be a stressful test.

It is designed to leave you with very little, if any, time spare.

The UCAT mock exam day will give you the opportunity to develop strategies to cope with being time-poor and having a consistent amount of pressure. Doing a dry-run will also help you learn how to best use the tools at your disposal so you can achieve your UCAT goals.

2. Time management

UCAT is designed to make you time poor and work under pressure.

Medicine is a high-pressure environment where split-second decision mean the difference between a good outcome and a negative one. UCAT is designed to force you and the other candidates to make a series of decisions and produce complex answers in short spaces of time. This demonstrates that you have the right skill set for the healthcare professions.

Remember, the UCAT has 5 sections. The first four subtests test your cognitive ability and the last subtest, Situational Judgement, assesses your ability to make moral and ethical decisions.

The timing and structure of each subtest is shown below:

There is clearly a challenge!

For example, you will only have a little more than 20 seconds for each situational judgement question.

Similarly, for abstract reasoning you need to answer 55 questions in 13 minutes. That’s around 10-15 seconds per question. It’s not that different to the time you’ve just spent reading this sentence and processing it.

To excel under these circumstances, you need to execute excellent time management skills. You’re not going to learn how to do this without first sitting a practice test and seeing how you perform.

Unlike other practice tests, the UCAT MED has stakes that matter: it is your only opportunity to see how you compare to other candidates prior to the actual UCAT.

3. Question Practice

The UCAT requires you to know how to answer a variety of different questions types consistently and accurately.

The UCAT offers a staggeringly large variety of possible questions. For example, there is an infinite number of abstract reasoning questions you may face. The only way you may improve your pattern recognition skills is if you practise them on unseen questions, under pressure.

The UCAT MED will give you that opportunity, for free. In addition, there is an extra practice test you can sit with a free UCAT Masterclass account.

If you’re unsure of what sorts of questions you may face, you should refresh your memory with our detailed subtest guides:

• Verbal reasoning
• Decision making
• Quantitative reasoning
• Abstract reasoning
• Situational judgement

If you need to score well in UCAT and improve your performance, you must take as much practice as you can get, right?

Need more help preparing for the UCAT MED?

The UCAT Masterclass UCAT Guide has all of the answers you need to understand the UCAT! Read it here.

4. See your rankings

The UCAT MED is not a standalone online test. It is a WORLDWIDE EXAM DAY. 

When students sit the UCAT MED, they are sitting a global assessment that calculates their decile position  compared to thousands of other students around the world.

Remember, the UCAT is sat by people in:

• The United Kingdom (England, Scotland, and Wales)
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Italy
• Poland
• Iraq and Kurdistan
• The Caribbean

Sitting the UCAT MED allows you to see not only how you perform, but also how you rank – in decile bands – against every other participant. This is just like the actual UCAT. In fact, the only thing closer than this to the UCAT is the actual UCAT.

Knowing how you are positioned against others lets you decide how much work you need to put in between January and July.

5. Self Reflection

The UCAT MED allows you to reflect on what you do really, really well.

But must importantly, it allows you to honestly examine your weaknesses.

Self-reflection is a sadly underrated skill. Self-reflection allows us to objectively appraise what we do well and what we do badly.

UCAT is a test that demands you do well.

To this end, the UCAT MED lets you see a performance report that gives you detailed insights into your strengths and weaknesses. This information is invaluable as it allows you to critically formulate a plan to improve your marks with time before the UCAT in July.

Sitting the UCAT MED on Sunday February 27 2022 will give you over 5 months to target your weaknesses and develop the skill set you need for success.

Want to sign up for the UCAT MED?

You can set up a free UCAT Masterclass account here.