Dr Luke works as a UCAT tutor Melbourne and provides one-to-one and student-organised tutoring either in person or online.
How to achieve a high score in UMAT?
Although ACER believes that training for UCAT/UMAT is not necessary, specialised preparation helps students to be familiar with the types of questions, develop effective strategies to solve the questions under the test conditions, build students’ confidence for the testing day.
I have followed and tutored the UCAT/UMAT since 2008 in Melbourne. I am familiar with the styles of questions and skills tested. Based on expertise in biological research, I have developed a set of effective strategies to solve UMAT questions, especially those on logical reasoning & problem solving and non-verbal reasoning. These questions test student’s ability in scientific reasoning, such as deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning.
Students find my strategies very effective, especially in continuing the series, picking the middle, completing the picture, logical reasoning. Quite a few students got 90% above. One of my UMAT students got an average percentile of 99% in UMAT.
UCAT/UMAT Information from ACER?
UMAT (the Undergraduate Medicine and Health Sciences Admission Test) is one of prerequisites for admission to medicine, dentistry and optometry courses in Australia. Some health related science courses, such as clinical sciences, vision sciences, and oral health sciences require a UMAT score as well.
UMAT is designed by ACER and held in July yearly. Although, there is no clearly stated sessions, the questions can be grouped into three categories, logic reasoning & problem solving, understanding people and abstract non-verbal reasoning, which are considered important to the study and later practice of professions in the health sciences.
The questions on logical reasoning & problem solving are normally introduced by brief texts, tables, or pieces of information presented graphically. Questions assess students’ ability to comprehend, draw logical conclusions, reach solutions by identifying relevant facts, evaluate information, pinpoint additional or missing information, and generate and test plausible hypotheses.
The questions on understanding people assess students’ ability to identify, understand, and, where necessary, infer the thoughts, feelings, behaviour and/or intentions of the people represented in the situations.
The questions on non-verbal reasoning may be of several kinds. All are based on patterns or sequences of shapes and are designed to assess your ability to reason in the abstract and solve problems in non-verbal contexts.
The information above is based on UMAT information booklet 2015.