A Guide to Applying to Dental School: Scoring high on the UKCAT

The first part of the application for most of you is going to be the UKCAT.
This guide aims to make sure come the day of the exam you score as high as possible. In it, I go through how best to prepare in the weeks prior to the test and how to tackle each section.

 

When to book your Test

The piece of advice that is going to underpin everything else in this guide is Enjoy your summer! Don't fall into the trap of preparing for the UKCAT straight after you finish AS exams. There is no point. Any more than 3 weeks prep is over kill and you run the risk of falling into that period of time where you second guess every call you make because you are overthinking.

The best way to do it is to book a test at you local test centre, as soon as you can, for the last week of August and then don't even think about it again until 3 weeks before your test date. Pay some attention to what time you book your test for as well. Whether you consider yourself to be a morning person or a late riser, studies have shown that most people hit their stride mentally between 11am and 2pm. It would be a shrewd move to book a test in this window.

How best to prepare

Like I mentioned previously, I genuinely believe the best way to prepare is to spend 2-3 hours a day for no more than 3 weeks before your test practicing questions. This is more than enough time for you to get up to speed and achieve the highest scores you are able to.

There are plenty of free resources available online, a quick google search will find most of them. Be careful though, the quality control on many of these sites is non existent so sometimes you will be puzzled to discover you have a question wrong when you were convinced you had nailed it, this is because the answer is just wrong on the website. Sometimes the websites themselves are just buggy in general. Unfortunately, problems like these are common amongst the free sites, although they can be a great resource if you take into account those issues.

At the other end of the spectrum are the classroom course that cost hundreds of pounds to complete. Avoid them. They are complete overkill and seem designed to exploit those who have more money than sense.

You are much better off buying a book like '600 UKCAT Practice Questions' or the best option of all, if you are going to spend any money, which I would suggest if you can afford it, is to subscribe to Medify for a month for about £35.

It has more practice questions that you can go through in that amount of time and, more importantly, It gives you detailed feedback as to the correct answer. The layout also mirrors the actual test so everything will feel very familiar to you come the day of the test.

Honestly, I wasted spent loads of money on books to try and prepare, and used none of them once I had a Medify subscription.

Verbal Reasoning

It used to be possible, with the old style true/false type questions, to just read the question and then look for the relevant bit in the text to confirm a true or false statement. This meant you could really blaze through the questions.

The new style questions require you to show more understanding of the text itself, the only way to answer these is to skim read the entire text before hand. This is time consuming and you are likely to run out of time. The best thing to do here is to keep going until you have a minute left and then just guess the answers for however many are left. Because you don't get penalised for incorrect answers, this is a useful way of picking up extra marks when you have run out of time.

Quantitative Reasoning

Remember, this one is all about the numbers. Don't spend too much time reading the accompanying blurb with the QR questions, they offer little help but reading them can take up valuable time. Let the questions lead you here. Read the question, look for the numbers you need and then do the sums.

The maths here is not particularly difficult but you need to get good at is quickly extracting the numbers you need and then doing the required sums as quickly as possible. Doing the sums in your head using pen and paper as you go is much, much, much quicker than using the calculator so practise basic mental arithmetic.

You will occasionally need to use the calculator. If you are on medify, then learn the shortcut to bring up the calculator, it will be the same as in the real thing. Also learn to use the num pad of a key board as this is much quicker than clicking each number.

Another great tactic is to just skip and flag any questions you are not able to figure out straight away and come back to them, if you have any time, at the end of the section. There is no point sinking time into a question you don't know how to do.

This, along with AR is the section that will improve most with practice. The scores you achieve in week 3 will dwarf whatever you were getting in the first few days, so don't panic if you don't do well here to start with.

Abstract Reasoning

The first time I saw an AR question like the one above, I shit myself. Most people find this daunting at first but it gets much easier the more you practice. The thing to remember here is that often, the rule is more straightforward than you might think.

The best thing to do with AR is count! Count the number of shapes, count angles, count the number of shaded shapes to non shaded shapes. Keep counting until you find something as it will often form the basis of the rule for a set. ie. Set A has and odd number of circles whilst Set B has an even number.

To begin with, finding the rules can be extremely difficult, but after a number of rules have been revealed to you during practice you will begin to see what sort of thing to look for. If you put the work in, this will become much easier and even fun!

The way to tackle AR come the day of the exam is to spend about 30 seconds to a minute deciphering the rule, and then answer the 4 or so questions as quickly as possible.

Once again practice makes perfect here.

Decision Analysis

This is the section that can really lift your overall average without too much effort on your part. Lots of people, including myself, managed to get 800+ scores on this section in 2013.

All you need to do is write down the words from the code as you go and then match the hobbled sentence to the one that matches best from the list given. Make sure you eliminate any sentence that contain any extraneous words not in the code sentence to avoid any easily made mistakes.

Don't panic here and you will score well.

Remember

You do not lose marks for getting an answer wrong, so if you run out of time just guess! you don't lose anything if you guess all the wrong answers but if you stumble upon some right answer you pick up extra marks.

Avoid the temptation to do a practice test the morning of your test. You will be prepared already and a bad result could affect you for the real thing.

If one section goes badly don't allow it to affect you performance in the other sections, you can pull it back if you don't panic. Most universities only look at your average score.

Save the mock exams of the official website and the medify mocks so that you can do one a day in the lead up to your test.

Most people get score much higher than they did in the mocks in the real thing so don't beat yourself up about scoring lower than hoped in the mocks.

Good luck and have fun!