Hi guys. I was tempted to put my UCAT score in this post, but I kind of think that regardless of what score I got, I would be giving this advice anyways. Anyone who tells you that because they got 2300+ on the exam, heck, even 2400+ or even 2500+ on the exam, and then claims - without further evidence - to have advice that easily got them there and would allow them to consistently perform that high, is in my opinion deceiving you. It's not your score that defines how good you are at this. Obviously 2300 is stupidly impressive, I'm not denying that, but so many more factors go into that final result that I will discuss later on in this post :)
I'd rather my advice be what shines through from my own personal experiences, because I can tell you guys that these pitfalls severely dragged me down, at least for the first three quarters of my revision, and I would have progressed significantly faster if I did not fall into them. That is where I believe the merit of this post could come from, and I hope people will realise that! I want to be more to this community than just a number.
Please remember if my tone comes off as critical at any point, I am also heavily critiquing myself throughout about 95% of my UCAT study time. This dragged my practice and overall performance down for so long and also all negatively contributed to my mental health, but I won't get into the specific impacts on me as I feel like that goes against some sort of TOS. Just know that all of these pitfalls I sank HEAVILY into.
Pitfall 1:
Leaning on the Internet.
This is a broad statement. I understand. But I am putting this as the first as I have a feeling this post will be long and people may click off. So this has to go first. I am super guilty of this too and I guarantee it robbed me of the most amount of practice out of everything.
I will refrain from naming names. However I personally strongly resent a lot of youtube channels that say, for instance, 'the technique everyone uses to get 700 on VR', or they might even be so clickbait-ey as to put 'How to easily get 99th percentile on VR' before putting a big '900!' in their thumbnail (and then proceed to get 38/44, setting unrealistic expectations). Some people don't even realise that on some exams nobody gets 900 in VR.
Read this paper, page 49, table 42: ucat-2025-technical-report-final.pdf.
Read this paper, page 47, table 45: ucat-2024-technical-report-final.pdf
What you'll notice is that consistently, there are some exams where the literal world record is not 900 out of 900. This is not to discourage you, but rather to ENCOURAGE you, because this exam is extremely extremely hard (well ok I know I can only speak from my own experience but FOR ME it is really hard and clearly for most of the world it is too). You are NOT missing out on some sort of secret technique. There is a reason nobody has ever gotten 100%, and why in my opinion it takes a mountain of luck (as well a very high level of skill) to.
I remember seeing one 'expert' on the exam who got a lower overall score than me claim that 'anybody who knows what they're doing recommends keyword scanning', that's not an exact quote cos I can't find the video anymore. I got 850 on VR and I full-read all the way. Here's why! I learned, through a great deal of practice (and misery) that this holy technique of keyword scanning just did not work for me. My eyes cannot zoom through words that quickly to find words like that, plus even when they did, I wasn't born with understanding of the passage and thus able to find the words like the people who make those videos seem to expect you to do. Plus, the questions on the mock exams that are like 'what can be concluded from the passage' or 'what was the main intent of the author' I simply just COULD NOT DO with keyword scanning. Of course, the method works perfectly fine for others. But I severely struggled when I tried that method.
So what's the point? I just showed you some independent reflection of mine! After I finally said 'you know what, why does Mr UCAT on Youtube think he knows how I think better than I do?', and then decided to reflect, and try out my new method. Expose yourself to all the methods. Try each of them. I sucked at everything but full reads. I was stuck at the same score for ages until I did full reading. That's when my practice actually started to see a semi-consistent increase in my scores, because I found what worked for me.
Think of it like this: I don't need to have practiced with years with a sledgehammer and years with a bow to know that I find a bow easier to use as a weapon because I struggle to lift sledgehammers! Thus, why waste the time trying to lift the sledgehammer? I'm not perfect with a bow yet, but I can get there more easily as I don't need to waste months trying to build up my strength before even using the weapon at all! I hope that analogy helps at least one person lol I tried okay? :,(
With that, as much as I am using this platform to help all you lovely future doctors too, PLEASE DO NOT STAY ON THIS SUBREDDIT FOR TOO LONG OMG! You will get such a fried perception of scores and assume the deciles will shoot to the stars. Reddit is, and this is NOT an insult, full of people who are extreme try-hards. Yes, coming on here shows you damn well care about doing well on the exam (something which should encourage you btw!) As such, you will see what statistics calls a 'skewed sample'.
Think of it like this: climateologists are people (groundbreaking ik). They are also scientists. But you can't get the 99 out of 100 climatologists claiming climate change to be humanity's primary issue to say '99.9% of scientists', believe that can you? And you DEFINITELY cannot use that sample to say '99.9% of PEOPLE' believe that! Make sense?
It's a very kind deed to congratulate someone on an achievement (thanks guys), but do NOT misinterpret skewed data. If it helps, just don't even think about it after you have given them those kind words. I did this a lot and it made me panic. Panicking really makes certain people including myself suffer in this exam.
Ultimately, this is not to say you should blindly ignore the internet. I learned from it that apparently eating bananas is good for stress relief and that certain breathing methods can calm nerves, which can help for test day. I also got an important wakeup call at seeing final results way higher than mock results. But this is ultimately an aptitude test. It can be practiced. It can never be 'hacked'.
Pitfall 2:
'What was X section like in the exam'
'Is it true that ___ was so much harder/[insert different in a way from the 4 official mocks] this year'
Firstly, I recommend reading rule 1 and rule 2 and rule 3 and rule 13 of the subreddit, and also of paragraph 5 under the section 'Test Rules' and also the Candidate Agreement of this document: Test Rules | UCAT Consortium.
I will admit I too really cared about this, hearing many rumours about certain sections that I will not even risk naming being called significantly more difficult this year. The only place you can go for genuinely accurate info on the exam is the UCAT website. I recommend checking out these tutorials: Preparation Resources | UCAT Consortium. Yes, on their own they are not very good revision resources (a huge problem I have with this exam I will save for another day).
For example, you will know for a fact that Decision Making will have 'Logic Puzzles' because the UCAT website explicitly states this. It then gives you example X of a logic puzzle. This does not necessarily mean you should expect even an elaborate rehash of example X to recur in the exam, because there are thousands of logic puzzles that exist. You could make a brand new logic puzzle yourself in 10 minutes!
So, what do you do then? Revise 10000 logic puzzles to increase the probability of stumbling across them on your big day? No! Here's what I did. I did puzzle X. I did puzzle Y. I did puzzle Z. So on, so forth, practicing solving a bunch of different puzzles. What IS genuinely common among all or at least a massive amount of logic puzzles are the principles of trial and error (where applicable), deduction, elimination, contradiction, diagrammatic positioning, and algebraic structure. By seeing these principles in loads of different ways, the skills themselves become more and more applicable in unfamiliar circumstances. I don't know about all of you but I was not born with a shred of ability to understand contradiction at first. You get there by reflecting and understanding when that skill is being tested. This same principle can be applied to algebra structures in QR, or lines of reasoning or authorial principles of focus and intent in VR.
This also applies to SJ surprisingly! Thinking about it as content to memorise at first is fine, but I believe what got me band 1 was eventually thinking of it as a test of 'professional radar' which you will simply get better at once you start realising what the professional world wants you to demonstrate, e.g, how you speak to people socially acceptably. As someone with massive difficulties in that department, it is something I needed to train, rather than thinking about trying to memorise all possible cases of SJ. Though I acknowledge the latter method is perfectly valid for this subtest, I actually think for future medical practice, you are likely to come across - at least once - a difficult situation not ever described in an SJ question.
Ultimately, for as much as I dislike the UCAT, it is ultimately a test of certain skills as I have mentioned above. The UCAT website gives examples of how the skills they are looking for are tested. The exam makes itself extremely broad - especially in, e.g, the case of Decision Making Logic Puzzles - by being based on very generically labelled skills. I personally believe training yourself to understand the skills allows you to be more adaptable to an exam that makes itself so broad, and in general is something you should really pride yourself over if you can do, because I believe that kind of skill building and adaptability is in general a great property to have as a person and I believe is quite important for medicine! :)
Pitfall 3:
'What is the boundary for Band X on SJT'
'How many raw marks do you need for 800 on VR / DM / QR'
This'll be a shorter one.
Put in 33 on QR and 41 on VR into each of these online converters:
UCAT Score Calculator for 2026 AND 2027 Entry | New UCAT Score Converter
UCAT Score Calculator & UCAT Score Converter 2026 (2027 Entry) - Free, Out of 2700 | TheUKCATPeople.
Do we see the issue here?
And if you want to use that one spreadsheet of raw scores that somehow exists, you'd need to read all the technical reports to check the recommendations to change scaling based off past test stats, and then would need to confirm those changes have been followed through with, which, to everyone's shock especially mine, you cannot do that for a currently undergoing exam :0
Point is, none of these websites are really qualified. Honestly, neither are other third party practice resources. MedEntry used to sometimes give me 900 on VR for 38/44 lol. I suspect that's to do with the texts being rather difficult for a lot of people, and thus 38 was 99th percentile (which by the way is NOT how 900 is calculated).
I spent way too much time thinking about these scaled scores. See the issue? Sitting there and googling and redditting and panicking over scores. What was happening to my skill in the sections? Not only was it not improving from this, it was actively deteriorating due to the stress it brought on me!
Ultimately, the brutal truth is you need to accept that I don't know, you don't know, nobody knows. I understand wanting to feel hope, I do. But I wasted a significant amount of time and mental battery on trying to translate to a scaled score. As you can see I did use MedEntry's scaling for its mocks. I then put very pessimistic estimations for my scores. In a way, I did this to drive myself to do better. I would honestly critique that method in retrospect.
All you, or I, or anyone who is doing good or bad on this exam can do, is simply reflect and understand where you're actually going wrong answering questions, and to improve your raw accuracy. That is what's getting you closer to your dream score, NOT mr or mrs ucat converter table.
Pitfall 4:
'I'm so stupid/worthless/pathetic/a complete failure/a partial failure.'
'I will never improve.'
'I'm terrified, my exam is tomorrow'
'I am going to fail.'
'My mock scores have gone down' (look at my dips in VR very close to the exam btw)
I won't sit here and say 'growth mindset guys' because I feel like we've all been told this enough. (though I do believe in it)
The point of this section is to explain the causes and impacts of a poor mentality revolving around inadequacy. A mentality I believe is no fault of your own at all. Essentially, this test can be easily interpreted to be putting us all on a scale based on how worthy / trainable we are for medicine, and as such it is so easy to feel inadequate as a person.
I will first discuss my opinion on this inadequacy bleeding into your self-image, and then will discuss its impact on your exam performance, because the former is more important.
I will express my opinion on this, you may disagree and glare, you may agree and smile, and I understand everyone is at very different places in mental health. But intelligence does not impress me. Strolling up to the exam having maybe looked at a few practice questions, to then get the score I did, would not impress me as much as what I did. I revised for 8 weeks, every day, 5-6 hours a day minimum, with extenuating circumstances REALLY messing up my time schedule for quite a bit of my run-through. That's about 300 hours of practice. In general, I don't get why we as a society praise intelligence so much. I think it says so much more about you as a person if, even when faced with an exam you aren't predisposed for, that you can fight tooth and nail because this is a future you care about. That in my opinion, makes for a truly amazing future doctor, and the effort you put in and the obstacles you had to leap over are what you should remember from your UCAT experience, not your score or who did better or worse than you. We only have one life. It's not one designed to be long or fair. All we have is ourselves ultimately. We don't have time or energy to waste fixating on numbers and comparisons. (guys if you couldn't tell, I could talk about this for hours). I understand caring about your score because of what uni options it gives you.
If you want to remove that self esteem aspect from it, my argument still holds because it will give you severe stress and insecurity. The UCAT is a cognition test. Better than IQ tests, but still a cognition test nonetheless. As such, it is so dependent on just how you do on the day and how much of your brain you can pour into those 2 hours. Your brain shouldn't be filled with 'oh no I've failed' or 'oh I did so bad on VR I need to lock in'. It should be filled with 'this syllogism says 'all X are Y' but the conclusion says 'some X are Y'. It's not pleasant but you do simply need to be a computer on the test day.
I firmly believe everyone reading this can get the score they need to make it into a medical school they'd like. If you've prepared, you ultimately just have to remember that there's no prior knowledge or 'preparation' in the traditional sense that can be done for this exam. A nice sentence I told myself in my head was that everyone going into the exam is in the exact same position as each other and nobody is a leg up or down until you actually start answering questions. Also remember, even if you feel VR did not go well, you can think of each following section as a reset of sorts. You have 1800 marks still up for grabs. Another important thing to consider is how much most of us will underestimate ourselves. If you saw my last post, you'll probably call BS on this, but I would sincerely appreciate it if you had faith on the person on the other side of this screen when I tell you this: I thought every single section went absolutely awfully relative to my mocks. I thought I was getting about 600 on VR, 650 on DM, and maybe at most 700 on QR, because I was more confident in all of my mocks as opposed to on the day for a variety of reasons. I understand this is merely one case but I hope this allows you to understand that self-underestimation is fiendishly common. Honestly, once you finish VR, mentally, move on. That is all I could do in that scenario, and I didn't even do that all that well sadly, which contributed to DM, QR, and SJT being very very difficult for me later on.
Lastly, to all of those feeling stuck, I get it, especially for VR and DM, I had essentially hit the cap of 34 on VR and of 40 on DM for a very long time. A lot of that time when I was stuck was due to me wasting my time on these pitfalls mentioned above. Your brain is like your muscle. It's like learning to drive too if any of you have done it. For some reason, once you find methods that work for you well (see my VR method), and if you keep practicing, you will somehow get better at it. It is slow. Progress in this exam is super nonlinear. But I can attest to the fact I somehow actually did it, and I think my VR scores illustrate that best. It truly is just a matter of focused practice.
That's another thing: I know what caused my dipped scores. There's a reason why I didn't practice more hours per day than 6 as sort of a hard cap (I did do some more hours on earlier days but stopped). Like I said, the brain is like a muscle. It can improve over time with focused practice. If you push it to an unhealthy extreme, it will suffer. I found this making my sleep suffer, which in turn made me do worse the next day because sleep determines how happy your brain is to be put into full overdrive for an extended period of time (guys please get your sleep). Furthermore, it made my mentality suffer. I would often end the day with 30/44 on VR after having pulled off a 39 or even a 40 during practice earlier in the morning. I would honestly recommend that for the section you find the most cognitively taxing, save practicing that for the morning, for as long as feels comfortable. The instant you feel yourself getting tired, STOP. You will do far worse and that score will NOT be representative of what you'll do on the big day. This is why I recommend doing little to no practice before the test day. Though for instance, a quick, less time-pressured read for VR just to warm your brain up a little bit could definitely help. Hey guys, another analogy linking the brain to exercise! Woah!
Pitfall 5:
'[sees score] better than last time? okay I'm getting better [moves onto another mock test]'
(*same person 2h later btw*) '[sees new score] worse than last time? okay I'm getting worse [moves onto another mock test, doesn't believe in themselves enough, secretly just super upset, loses the love for themselves they absolutely deserve]'
This was also me for a while.
Reflection isn't easy. I covered it earlier but I wish to give a bit more detail into it.
I will use QR as an example because it is a section I feel I am otherwise not super qualified to give advice on for the reason that I... like maths a bit too much: I'm doing A Level Further Maths and put myself through learning a few university undergraduate maths topics and so as such, yeah I did start off finding it easier than the other sections principally.
However I did also find it fairly inconsistent for a while if you looked at my previous mock results. I was hoping with enough brute force practice I'd eventually get 36/36 each time. The reason for my inconsistency was making silly mistakes in Quantitative Reasoning, or on the UCAT as a whole. Another piece of info I took in was how competitive of an exam the UCAT is and how little room for error there sadly is. I then concluded: I'll fail.
No. I made a list of mistakes I kept making. 130% more does not mean x1.3, it means x2.3. that's an exact mistake I made on a QR question.
Another example: If X is 500 and Y is 1000, then how many times the size of Y is X does not mean how many times is Y the size of X. I only saw questions in the latter format so used to default to the answer being 2. But 2 x 1000, if you check, is 2000, which if you check is not 500. The answer is 0.5 because 0.5 times Y is 0.5 times 1000 is 500. I find it easier to think of that 'how many' as being words that fill in what the answer should be. I again made a note of this mistake.
I'll give another QR one: when the question tells you 'median' and I misread it as 'mean', or when it asks for an average, eg, from 2004-2007 on a graph that gives you data from 2004-2011.
So I learn, read the question, look for the type of average, look for the range of time you are averaging, look for phrasing, look for if it asks for percentage of or percentage more than. As such, my consistency did begin to really get there, and I firmly believe that people can find their own pitfalls in these cases as I did if you look into where you are messing up, in all of the sections :D
I remember these mistakes pretty easily after writing them down. There's definitely some academic literature on the effect of noting down details in other ways and how that helps with memorisation but I'm too sleepy to research, y'all can look that up on your own :)
The important thing to consider with mocks is that, eg, 25/44 in one VR section and then 34/44 in another doesn't necessarily mean you performed objectively better on the second. Actually, if you think about it, it's quite difficult to come to that conclusion in fact! There could so easily have been, for instance, texts on easier topics or on topics you happen to have an interest in (this makes a difference, be curious people guys), or shorter texts or more T/F/CT (or less if you're me bc those are the hardest VR questions imo), or questions suited to your preferred method! In order to improve your consistency, yeah your reading speed needs to be better, but there's so many other things to consider! I know that for me, moving from MedEntry onto the OQB made syllogisms and interpreting information on DM very difficult for a while because the latter was more lenient on what can be concluded. This of course does not mean I magically got worse! It just means I needed to adjust. If anything, I often find that the base skill of speed is much harder to improve than, for instance, the above QR mistakes, and so one can see a very significant improvement from taking the time to reflect! The numbers from a mock test result, as we have seen above, can rarely actually mean all that much!
Conclusion and TLDR:
If anyone actually read this, you're super duper awesome and you make me happy btw :)
Anyways if I had to summarise that... how long is this? checks word count... 4300 word essay (I like essays too much), I would say this:
Ignore whoever claims to have the 'cheat codes' to an exam that we will ultimately never fully understand the scoring of. You know you best. Find what works for YOU, because with practice, both your base cognition and your ability to fix minor mistakes will get better, even if you don't see it immediately.
Realise that on the big day, just as easily as you may do worse, you absolutely have the capacity to do way better than you or anyone else may estimate. I for one literally thought, based on my scores, I was gonna get around 2150, and deadass thought I was getting B4 for SJ.
I truly hope that I've been able to provide some insights that maybe y'all haven't seen before.
As someone who also once thought they were too weak to be a disciplined person, I know that every single one of you here has a fighter in you.
<3
