Understanding GAMSAT- Your Guide to Success
Before reading any further, let us first understand “what is GAMSAT?” GAMSAT stands for Graduate Australian Medical School Admissions Test. This is a test jointly conducted by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the Consortium of Graduate Medical Schools, every year as an entrance exam into the medical, dental, pharmacy and veterinary institutes in both graduate and postgraduate levels. Depending on the percentile, students who clear GAMSAT are eligible to join in any of the above mentioned disciplines, in any of the medical or other institutes in Australia, Great Britain and Ireland. Students, who have finished their Bachelors degree or in the final year of their Bachelors program are eligible to take GAMSAT. There are no restrictions of having a science background. Students from any discipline can appear for GAMSAT. GAMSAT is more of a reasoning test compared to other exams that test your knowledge in the subject. It’s purely based on the reasoning ability of the student and his/her problem solving capacity. The most important scoring criteria in this exam will be your judgmental skills that you have gained over the years as a student. Most questions either contain pictorial representations or graphical illustrations and a student has to interpret them properly to be able to answer the question correctly. The overall duration of the exam is five and half hours and consists of three sections namely:
1. Reasoning in Humanities and Social Sciences (75 questions, 100 minutes)
2. English Written Communication Assessment ( 2 essays to be written in 60 minutes)
3. Reasoning in the Biological and Physical Sciences (110 questions, 170 minutes)
GAMSAT preparation, unlike other exams needs more time. It is always advisable to start early when preparing for GAMSAT. Being consistent and avoiding crash course like preparation will definitely play an important role in these exams. It is recommended that you join different chat groups and forums that are based on GAMSAT platform. You will have to be as creative as possible and should be able to think out of the box in order to score a good percentile. Mugging up the text books simply won’t help, so please try to avoid it. Interacting with people from different backgrounds will be helpful as most of the questions in
GAMSAT are dependent on your analyzing capacity and judgmental skills. Understanding the basic concepts and being able to apply them in various situations is the backbone of GAMSAT preparation. About the Author : The history GAMSAT goes back to 1995 when it was first launched in Australian medical schools and then from there on it got accepted in UK universities. Visit this site to prepare yourself for GAMSAT.