UCAT? (2 Viewers)

[indeed]

I'm not sure what to do in uni, my current career interests range greatly from economics to science etc. (but a littler bit more interested in economics, though there are more successful jobs in science field):
Now to the question, is it worth doing UCAT in this situation (just in case I might pursue a science/med course)? And is it worth the effort?

 

[Average Boreduser]

How interested are you into medicine? UCAT isn't something you can do on the side as an option. It requires alot of work, and usually money as well if you enroll for med entry workshops or other face to face tuition. If you do want to do UCAT, i suggest you should start ASAP, given I believe UCAT is coming up in around 3 months.

 

[indeed]

How interested are you into medicine? UCAT isn't something you can do on the side as an option. It requires alot of work, and usually money as well if you enroll for med entry workshops or other face to face tuition. If you do want to do UCAT, i suggest you should start ASAP, given I believe UCAT is coming up in around 3 months.

I'm not particularly passionate about medicine, but I treat it as an open pathway I guess

 

[carrotsss]

Reasons to sit the UCAT

• Keeps your options open to study med
• If your local university requires UCAT for med then it could save a lot of headaches

Reasons not to sit the UCAT

• Apparently you have to invest tons of time into preparing if you want to do well
• If you do well on UCAT you might feel pressured to go into med even though you don’t genuinely want to
• If you don’t end up wanting to go into med, then you have to be willing to accept that you’ve pretty much thrown $300 and many hours of your life into the bin
• Some unis don’t require ucat if you change your mind

 

[indeed]

Reasons to sit the UCAT

• Keeps your options open to study med
• If your local university requires UCAT for med then it could save a lot of headaches

Reasons not to sit the UCAT

• Apparently you have to invest tons of time into preparing if you want to do well
• If you do well on UCAT you might feel pressured to go into med even though you don’t genuinely want to
• If you don’t end up wanting to go into med, then you have to be willing to accept that you’ve pretty much thrown $300 and many hours of your life into the bin
• Some unis don’t require ucat if you change your mind

Oh ok thank you as well!

 

[Average Boreduser]

• Some unis don’t require ucat if you change your mind

There is also insane competition in those unis from all the >86%tile'ers

 

[carrotsss]

There is also insane competition in those unis from all the >86%tile'ers

Just get .95 and go usyd med

 

[indeed]

Yeah I think Ucat will prob not suit me the best then, thanks guys for advice!

 

[moonsuyoung]

Yeah I think Ucat will prob not suit me the best then, thanks guys for advice!

If ur still interested in medicine, you can do something like biomedical engineering if ur interested in engineering!!

 

[Eagle Mum]

How interested are you into medicine? UCAT isn't something you can do on the side as an option. It requires alot of work, and usually money as well if you enroll for med entry workshops or other face to face tuition. If you do want to do UCAT, i suggest you should start ASAP, given I believe UCAT is coming up in around 3 months.

OP has already made up his mind not to pursue medicine, so this is academic, but, the original point of UMAT/UCAT was to assess aptitude for a career in medicine, so it was supposed to be something you should do on the side. My eldest wasn’t really sure she should do medicine and I wasn’t keen for her to do it, but she sat the UMAT with very little preparation and scored 98 which was one of the factors that led her to decide she was cut out for medicine. If someone struggles to score well in UCAT, they are probably going to struggle working long difficult shifts AND study for postgrad specialist exams as well as possibly raise a family.

 

[carrotsss]

OP has already made up his mind not to pursue medicine, so this is academic, but, the original point of UMAT/UCAT was to assess aptitude for a career in medicine, so it was supposed to be something you should do on the side. My eldest wasn’t really sure she should do medicine and I wasn’t keen for her to do it, but she sat the UMAT with very little preparation and scored 98 which was one of the factors that led her to decide she was cut out for medicine. If someone struggles to score well in UCAT, they are probably going to struggle working long difficult shifts AND study for postgrad specialist exams as well as possibly raise a family.

From what I’ve heard, unfortunately because of the amount of ucat preparation available now and the significant portion of ucat students who study for it nowadays, it’s become less of a thing you do on the side and more important to study for to just compete with everybody else who does study for it

 

[Eagle Mum]

From what I’ve heard, unfortunately because of the amount of ucat preparation available now and the significant portion of ucat students who study for it nowadays, it’s become less of a thing you do on the side and more important to study for to just compete with everybody else who does study for it

There were about 4000 students who sat for UMAT in 2015. I don’t think the candidature has changed all that much in eight years. My daughter was one of only two students from her school, so her English teacher (who had previously taught at JRAHS) joked with her that when she taught at JRAHS, on the day of the UMAT, she turned up to class and there wasn’t a single student there, but she reassured my daughter that she was just as good as any of her previous JRAHS students if not better than most at comprehension.

 

[Average Boreduser]

There were about 4000 students who sat for UMAT in 2015. I don’t think the candidature has changed all that much in eight years. My daughter was one of only two students from her school, so her English teacher (who had previously taught at JRAHS) joked with her that when she taught at JRAHS, on the day of the UMAT, she turned up to class and there wasn’t a single student there, but she reassured my daughter that she was just as good as any of her previous JRAHS students if not better than most at comprehension.

8 years on the surface may seem very minuscule, but there has been a significant revamp on the test, and additionally a much larger competition. Questions are now very formulated and don't vary as much as it most likely did back in 2015. Students also now possess much more preparation resources, which in turn has made the UCAT something you can't just casually do on the side. I know students who got 99%tile who worked 2x as hard for the UCAT as they did for the hsc.

 

[Eagle Mum]

and additionally a much larger competition.

The large majority of selective school students and top private school students were already sitting it in 2015, so I don’t see how the competition could have increased significantly.

 

[Eagle Mum]

Questions are now very formulated and don't vary as much as it most likely did back in 2015. Students also now possess much more preparation resources, which in turn has made the UCAT something you can't just casually do on the side.

No doubt many students benefit from greater preparation, but actually these questions are intended to select for students with natural abilities in deductive reasoning and inference such that the school curriculum should provide a sufficient foundation for the UCAT. In a recent thread on negative acceleration, there was a comment that ‘huge debates’ arise around simple questions and I was tempted then to comment that these questions are just at high school level and if the topics are well understood, there really isn’t any debate about their answers. Similarly, UMAT and UCAT questions are fairly straightforward if one has a solid foundation of learning (no rote learning).

 

[carrotsss]

The large majority of selective school students and top private school students were already sitting it in 2015, so I don’t see how the competition could have increased significantly.

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

 

[Eagle Mum]

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

See my response to Pethmin.

 

[Average Boreduser]

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

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

 

[Eagle Mum]

View attachment 38216
14000 students did the UCAT in 2022, nearly a 400% increase since 2015

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.

Anyway, I haven’t denied that extensive preparation doesn’t improve an individual’s chances of getting into med school, but as I said, if someone is struggling to get in after extensive preparation, they are more likely to struggle when they face simultaneous challenges of high & very demanding workloads, exams and raising families. Many doctors reach the end of their maximum ten years of speciality training and haven’t passed and have to start at first year again in the same or another college.

 

[carrotsss]

See my response to Pethmin.

Yeah I understand your point but the problem is that UCAT is a percentile system. Even if the questions are straightforward given the school curriculum and benefit natural skills, this doesn’t mean that with enough effort other students won’t dramatically improve at the UCAT style of questions (which they do, see the level of use of UCAT preparation courses). Unfortunately, unless one is quite talented I think it is now increasingly difficult to do well enough in the UCAT without any effort.

That said, I personally haven’t sat the UCAT and am not planning on doing so. I’m mostly going from accounts that I’ve heard within the last few years, and the fact that the results required to reach the 90th percentile are significantly increasing.