GAMSAT PREPARATION

GAMSAT Preparation: How To Prepare for the GAMSAT UK

Written by: Matt Amalfitano-Stroud

Preparation for the GAMSAT is vital, but the sections and questions are all so varied that it may feel like a mammoth task to sharpen your skills in everything covered. It’s true that becoming a natural at three different broad skillsets it tough, but there are some overarching skills that you can learn that will help you throughout the entire test. This guide will help you build the skills you need to succeed at the GAMSAT and prepare for each section effectively.

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HOW TO START YOUR GAMSAT PREPARATION

There are various things you need to know that will help you understand and prepare for all three sections of the GAMSAT, so let’s see how you should start off your studies.

The Graduate Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT) follows a similar format to the BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT) consisting of one Thinking Skills Section, one Science Section and one Essay Writing Section (albeit, in a different order). In the BMAT, these sections are all very different from one another and require three unique skill sets.

This is where the GAMSAT differs. You will need to be skilled at text analysis, science and writing to succeed in each of the three sections, but those aren’t the main things being tested. In reality, the GAMSAT aims to test applicants on far more general thinking skills that are required by any medical professional.

While these skills are harder to build up when compared to scientific understanding or effective writing techniques, they are easier to utilise once you have an understanding of them. Plus, they’re far more useful in a wide variety of real-world scenarios!

So what are these required skills? Let’s run through them:

Comprehension and Analysis

Each section of the GAMSAT will offer you a wide variety of stimuli to read and analyse, with all questions relating to these texts. Naturally, you will need to be able to analyse each of these stimuli in order to stand a good chance of getting the question right, so building your Comprehension and Analysis skills is crucial.

Looking at these individually, comprehension is probably the more simple skill here. This boils down to your ability to read the text presented to you and understand what is being said. When dealing with proverbs, quotes, diagrams and more, this isn’t always the simplest thing to do which is why you’ll need to build your comprehension skills up and become a more active reader (we’ll cover this in a bit).

GAMSAT questions will typically expect you to understand the stimuli beyond what is on the page, which is where analysis comes into play. Your analysis of a stimulant will pretty much always be based on the questions you’ve been given, so you first need to ensure you understand what is being asked (a further use for comprehension!). Building your analytical skills essentially means that you will learn how to thoroughly investigate the stimuli to understand more complex, less concrete elements of the text.

You’ll need to combine both of these skills to excel in the GAMSAT, as the questions you’re given are rarely straightforward. In Section 1 expect to analyse texts to understand their purpose, tone, biases and more, while Section 3 will require you to utilise these skills alongside your scientific knowledge to determine facts, hypotheses and more. Then there’s Section 2, which is all about identifying themes within short quotes and statements that offer no additional clues or context.

Exams.Ninja Tip

Developing these skills simply comes down to practice, so try to confirm your understanding of any text you read while analysing it for specific details like tone or purpose. You won’t be given definitive answers most of the time, but working through the thought process is the best way to make it feel natural.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking and analytical skills go hand-in-hand, but they’re two fairly different disciplines. While analysing text will help you gain a greater understanding of it and allow you to come to your own conclusions about certain elements, critical thinking requires a more objective approach that will be essential for answering questions about the actual, written content of the stimuli.

While critical thinking does come into play for the more conceptual questions about themes and tone, it’s essential when thinking about factual elements of the text, such as statements or data. Whether you’re identifying facts, interpreting information or making comparisons, you’re going to have to take a critical approach to the question.

What this means is that you will need to gather all the relevant information you can find from the stimulant, process all the potential solutions through objective questioning and make a decision as to which option is the most likely to be correct. This will primarily be relevant for Sections 1 and 3, although you will also want to use a similar thought process when determining the common theme among texts in Section 2.

Exams.Ninja Tip

Critical thinking skills are extremely broad and have limitless uses, so you may already be using them unconsciously. However, before you sit the GAMSAT, it’s worth reviewing the basic steps of critical thinking to ensure you’re approach is as objective and efficient as possible.

Reasoning

Reasoning refers to your ability to justify your thoughts using facts and effective arguments. At first glance, it may seem like this skill is only relevant to Section 2, as that’s the only section that requires writing. However, good reasoning abilities don’t just apply to verbal arguments – they can also benefit your own internal thought process.

The type of reasoning skills that will be most relevant in Section 2 is Verbal Reasoning skills, meaning your ability to explain your reasoning to another person via speech or text. However, in Sections 1 and 3, you will want to use your reasoning skills in combination with your critical thinking skills to quickly determine the viability of each answer option.

If you are able to properly justify your decisions to yourself, you will be able to approach each question with a lot more certainty and know that you’re making the best decisions. Being able to do this quickly is just the cherry on top!

Exams.Ninja Tip

Effective reasoning is essential for medical professionals, who are required to make life-altering decisions each and every day. Being able to properly justify each decision you make, combined with the previous skills, will ensure that you make the right call as often as possible and avoid potentially deadly mistakes.

That’s a lot to understand in a short period of time, but thankfully, you have likely been developing these skills throughout your whole life in order to get to the position you’re in now. However, it still helps to have a conscious awareness of them just to ensure you’re making the correct decisions as you work through the GAMSAT.

These skills can be practised at any time and for any reason, so let’s now focus on some preparation tips that are more specific to the GAMSAT.

General GAMSAT Preparation Tips

1. Understand the Exam Format

To avoid any unnecessary surprises, you should make sure you have a good understanding of how the exam is actually formatted. You’re going to need to familiarise yourself with the amount of questions in each section, the time limits and the scoring systems so you know what score to shoot for (our GAMSAT Scoring Guide offers plenty of info about this).

Below is the basic structure for the GAMSAT. These are just some of the details that you’ll need to know, so be sure to research the format for each individual section.

2. GAMSAT Resources

GAMSAT preparation requires resources, so you’ll need to explore the various options available to find materials that work for you. For GAMSAT preparation, you’ll typically find the following materials to help you through the process:

Many of these resources require an investment, but you will have some options for free preparation support (including initial basic access to GAMSAT.Ninja). If possible, we believe the required investment is worth it, especially when it comes to Question Banks and Mock Exams, which are both essential components of effective GAMSAT prep.

Beyond GAMSAT-specific materials, you can also utilise a variety of other resources. If you have science textbooks available from your previous studies, these should contain a lot of the required knowledge for Section 3.

There are also resources available from other, similar admissions tests, such as the LNAT and TSA, for Sections 1 and 2, or the BMAT and NSAA, for Section 3. These questions won’t follow the exact same format as the GAMSAT, but they do offer a large selection of similar questions to practice your skills with.

3. Create a Preparation Plan

With three unique sections to prepare for, it can feel like a daunting task to perfect your skills for each. That’s why it’s crucial to properly plan your studies using a preparation plan or timetable. The ideal prep plan will specify when your study sessions are, what you’ll be covering and what scores you should aim to achieve by certain deadlines.

When creating your plan, it is important to consider multiple things:

With all this in mind, you should be able to craft a week-by-week timeline of when you’ll be studying, what you’ll cover and which resources you’ll use. This should also help you balance your preparation alongside the rest of your important tasks, allowing you to effectively manage your time and energy.

4. Practice Active Reading Techniques

Reading is a large part of the GAMSAT, with each section even offering dedicated reading time. To make the most of this time in the test, it helps to practice these active reading techniques in order to form a greater connection with the stimuli you’re presented with:

Noting Down Major Points

When reading a stimulant, you may quickly pick up on its major themes, purpose, tone or other factors that may be included in the questions. To save time when you begin tackling the questions, note them down when you see them so you can get through the easier questions quickly.

Summarise the Main Argument

In longer passages, it is more than likely that the author has an overall argument that they are trying to express. If you can decipher what it is while reading, note it down. It may come in handy for a wide variety of questions!

Highlighting Key Points

The GAMSAT, being an online test, unfortunately doesn’t have a highlight function, meaning this tip is a bit trickier to action for the test. However, the idea of searching for keywords and phrases is still handy, so you can write down any specific details you may need to quickly recall. Plus, highlighting is still super helpful in other contexts!

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GAMSAT SECTION 1 PREPARATION TIPS

Now it’s time to look at some more section-specific preparation tips, starting with Section 1, Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences.

Section 1 of the GAMSAT is all about comprehension, interpretation and critical thinking in the context of a wide variety of mediums. As the title suggests, the main focus here is on humanities and social sciences, although the actual topics covered in the provided stimuli can be even broader than the name suggests.

All questions in Section 1 are multiple-choice, with 62 questions in total, spread across 15+ stimuli. These stimuli go far beyond standard text passages, with poems, quotes, diagrams and cartoons all being featured in the test. This will require you to rethink how you approach your preparation, so here are a few ways you can boost your skills:

1. Expand Your Wider Reading

All throughout your application, you will likely hear the same advice – engage in wider reading. In the context of your application, this pretty much just means content relating to medicine: books, case studies, research papers, news, etc. That’s definitely the right approach as your interviewers aren’t going to be interested in if you’ve read the latest best-seller, but reading for the GAMSAT is a different story.

As we’ve said, stimuli from the GAMSAT are very different to other admissions tests. Not only does it pull from both fiction and non-fiction, it also presents a variety of unconventional mediums. To be able to effectively read and properly analyse these texts in the exam, you’ll need to practice reading them now. As a reminder, here’s what you need to be preparing for:

Reading and analysing a one-panel comic is far different from reading a full passage from a historical text, so practising with each medium is vital for success. While you’ll be able to use GAMSAT practice questions as examples, it’s also important to seek out examples of each medium in everyday life. The more exposure you have to these types of stimuli, the easier it will be for you on test day.

2. Think Like A Storyteller

Although you will be faced with many stimuli discussing real-world issues, you will find just as many that come from works of fiction. These questions are less about an author’s intentions or arguments and more about characters, themes and tone.

Reading fiction takes a different mindset from non-fiction because the author plays a much smaller role in what you’re reading. While you can question why the author makes characters act in certain ways, they’re not directly expressing an opinion in the way a typical argumentative piece would display.

The majority of your analysis will come from what’s on the page, which will relate to the characters and story, not arguments and reasoning. As such, you need to view the author as a storyteller and work to decipher elements of the story being told, such as the themes that are explored or the tone of what is written.

Of course, the most effective way to practice this is to read fiction and analyse these elements. Reading through short stories rather than full-length novels will let you experience a wider variety of texts in a shorter period of time. Be sure to read through works with different themes, tones, settings, etc.

3. Time Your Reading

Section 1, more than any other section, relies on efficient active reading to make the most of your eight minutes of reading time. We’ve already discussed what skills you need to practice in order to become an effective active reader, but that’s only half the story.

With so many questions to take on in just 100 minutes, you’re going to need to be ready to read and analyse each stimulant fast. Some stimuli will take longer than others to get through (a full-length passage will obviously take longer to read than a single-panel comic), but efficient reading will still ensure you can get a decent understanding of each text within a shorter amount of time.

While there are certain techniques you can utilise such as skimming and searching for keywords, balancing the effectiveness and efficiency of reading really comes down to practice. You’ll have about 30 seconds to read through each stimulant, so try timing you’re reading. 30 seconds is an average, so you’ll need to determine how long each stimulant should take to read.

Remember, you can still re-read any stimulant after the reading time, but it’s best to try and get a good understanding of each one during those eight minutes. Practising your note-taking during this time will slow you down a bit during the initial read, but it should help save time in the long run.

As with all sections of the GAMSAT, practice questions will be the form of preparation, paired with a few mock exams under realistic exam conditions (which could be split into three parts if you don’t have a spare 5.5 Hours). Also, be sure that you’re familiar with the question types you’ll face in Section 1 – you can learn more about this in our Ultimate Section 1 Guide.

Let’s move on to Section 2, where we’ll explore more preparation tips for the writing portion of the test.

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GAMSAT SECTION 2 PREPARATION TIPS

As well as multiple-choice questions, you’re going to need to practice your writing skills in order to succeed in Section 2: Written Communication.

Section 2 is the most unique section of the GAMSAT, as you’re going to be writing instead of answering multiple-choice questions. However, even compared to essay writing tasks in other admissions tests, such as the BMAT or LNAT, the GAMSAT is pretty different.

Instead of a question or prompt to write a large essay about, Section 2 requires you to complete two tasks. Provided only with a collection of 4 – 5 quotes or statements, it’s down to you to figure out the common theme that these prompts share, which will form the basis of your writing.

This section requires you to think differently, so let’s explore how you can prepare yourself for Section 2:

1. Build Your Interpretation Skills

We discussed this in the intro, but these skills are extremely important for Section 2. The first step of any Section 2 task is to interpret the themes of each of the presented quotes. Doing this correctly is important as you will not receive marks for your writing if you discuss the wrong topic, no matter how good your writing is.

Thankfully, this isn’t too difficult to do for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the themes included will generally be fairly easy to spot. Since you have four or five quotes to work with, you’ll likely spot the theme in at least two of them, which will then allow you to examine the rest and determine if they fit into said theme.

As well as this, there are set types of themes used for each task that will remain consistent in each exam. In Task 1, themes will relate to sociocultural issues, while Task 2 will always relate to more personal and social issues. Below are some example themes that you can expect to see in each task:

Task 1: Socio-cultural Issues

Task 2: Social/Personal Issues

Make sure you remember these, as it will help you narrow down the themes in each task much easier.

2. Think About Your Writing Style

If you’ve already read our Section 2 GAMSAT Guide, then you should already be familiar with the unique approach to writing and marking that the GAMSAT takes. Essentially, all applicants are given creative freedom when it comes to how they write their two answers, as long as they adequately provide an answer and effective reasoning to the tasks.

This means that you’re not confined to the traditional essay format that you have likely gotten used to with your academic writing. For some, this is the perfect chance to better express their thoughts in a written format. Here are some examples of how you could write your work:

Of course, this isn’t a requirement for anyone. Most applicants still choose to write in a standard essay format as this is the style they’re most used to. It’s quick and doesn’t require much thought as to how you can explain your views, but it’s not perfect for everyone.

Since Section 2 answers don’t need to be long (more on this next) we suggest trying out different writing styles while practicing if you feel one might work better for you. You’ll need to write a lot of practice pieces to get fully prepared, so there will be plenty of chances for experimentation.

3. Learn To Cut Back

As. we hinted at in the last tip, GAMSAT Section 2 essays don’t need to be long. Not only is there no set word count/limit for the tasks but you’re also given the least amount of time of any section to plan and write two different pieces of work.

At just 65 minutes (including 5 minutes of reading time), you aren’t going to have time to write two fully explored 1,000-word essays. The tasks you’ll be given don’t even require that amount of analysis and applicants are marked on their ability to explain their point clearly and concisely, without unneeded filler.

For those used to 4,000-word academic essays, this may cause a little bit of shock. That’s why you’re going to need to learn how to cut back and edit on the fly. GAMSAT pieces are typically around 400 – 500 words each, so it’ll take some practice to get your work down to that level.

When you start your GAMSAT practice, you could try and write shorter work if you feel comfortable doing so. But if not, it’s best to start off writing in a manner that you find comfortable. Ignore the time limits to start with as you’re not going to be able to create a high-scoring piece of work in 30 minutes on your first try.

With each piece you write, you should then aim to edit it down to the shortened target word count. As you continue to do this, you should be able to spot the consistent issues in your writing style, such as over-explanation or excessive word usage. Once you’re aware of these issues, you can take steps to reduce them in your work, which should result in clearer, more concise writing that gets straight to the points you’re trying to make!

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GAMSAT SECTION 3 PREPARATION TIPS

GAMSAT Section 3 (Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences) is the final part of the exam. It’s at test of not only the skills you utilised in the previous two sections but also your understanding of scientific concepts in the three core sciences. Let’s see how you can get prepped for this.

Section 3, for many applicants, will require the most amount of preparation. Unless you’ve been studying science prior to your medicine application, or are just a massive science enthusiast, you’re going to need to revise your subject knowledge as well as work through practice questions.

All of this takes a lot of time, which is why your preparation plan will be vital for balancing your time between Section 3 and the other sections. When you’re prepping for Section 3, here are some tips that should help you maximise your time.

1. Know What's In The Test

As with any exam, it pays dividends to have a full understanding of what will be featured in the test. For Section 3 of the GAMSAT, you’ll find questions for all three core sciences; Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

The syllabus for this section covers knowledge at a first-year university level for Biology and Chemistry and A-level Physics knowledge. If you’re at all familiar with these sciences, there won’t be any major surprises in the list of required knowledge.

GAMSAT Biology Required Knowledge

GAMSAT Chemistry Required Knowledge

GAMSAT Physics Required Knowledge

Beyond the required knowledge, you’re also going to need to be familiar with the stimuli and question types available. Stimuli will typically be presented as a passage, formula, diagram, table or graph, though many questions mix mediums.

As for the questions, there is a wide variety of things that could be asked, ranging from linear problem-solving to evidence evaluation and hypothesis generation. Our Definitive GAMSAT Section 3 Guide offers a full rundown of all the questions that may be asked in the test. Familiarise yourself with all of these details and you’ll be in a good position to perfect your GAMSAT exam technique.

2. Focus On Your Weak Spots

Your GAMSAT prep time isn’t unlimited, so you’re going to need to be smart about what you focus on. If you’ve continued to study science in higher education, you should have a good idea of where your strengths lie, and more importantly, what you’re weaker at.

The best thing you can do with your prep time is build up these weaknesses to help boost the potential marks you could get on the test. Of course, this is easier said than done, but with the right routine and motivation you should still be able to gain enough competency to get some questions correct.

In order to more definitively monitor your progress, you should aim to set a target goal or score to achieve by a certain date. With each target met, you’ll be able to check more and more topics off your list. However, be sure to maintain your understanding of these topics as well as the ones you consider to be strengths. With the pressure of the test, you may freeze up and forget your skills if they haven’t been practised beforehand.

3. Look Beyond The GAMSAT

The GAMSAT has a very unique style of questions when compared to previous exams, with its use of stimuli and a greater focus on general thinking skills. However, it’s still a science test at the end of the day and there are tonnes of other science tests that you can gain practice resources from.

To start with, you can check out the various other admissions tests used by universities, including Oxford and Cambridge. The BioMedical Admissions Test (BMAT) was the other main undergraduate medicine admissions test in the UK (next to the UCAT) until is discontinuation in 2023. One section (Section 2) of this exam focused on multiple-choice science questions, just like the GAMSAT. While these questions aren’t identical to the GAMSAT (it doesn’t have overarching stimuli for starters), it still offers a fair challenging science test to practice with.

Beyond this, Cambridge also had an admissions test for its natural science course, suitably called the Natural Sciences Admissions Test (NSAA). This is a full science test that offers MCQs at multiple levels of difficulty. There are 40 questions for each science in each paper, giving you a lot. of practice material to work with if you download all of the past papers.

Past papers are also available for two physics tests used by Oxford and Cambridge, the Physics Admissions Test (PAT) and Engineering Admissions Assessment (ENGAA). However, these only cover maths and physics, which are the two least important subjects of the GAMSAT.

That rounds off our advice for GAMSAT preparation. We hope that the tips we’ve provided will help you make the most of your prep time and get the best score possible. if you haven’t already, check out our Definitive GAMSAT Guide to learn more about the test itself. Plus, if you want to take your preparation to the next level, sign up to GAMSAT.Ninja for free now!

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