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So you’ve decided to spend x hours per week preparing for the UMAT. Well done on making a commitment! But it doesn’t end there. The next step is to squeeze as much as you can get out of those HPAT preparation hours. One way of doing this and making the questions work for you is to carefully review solutions. When going through HPAT practice questions, it’s very tempting to avoid reading the solutions for one reason or another. As someone who achieved 100th percentile in the HPAT, I’ll try to make a case for reading the solutions all the time....

There are many different approaches to problem-solving that have been established in psychology. Firstly, there’s the Thorndike paradigm, which involves blind trial and error 1 . More purposeful approaches are the Gestalt approach, and the cognitive approach. The Gestalt approach involves solving problems as a whole 2 . You see the problem, you see what you have, and then you try to see how everything fits together. If the question is routine, it’s very easy to figure it out. If it isn’t, well, sometimes you gain insight, but sometimes you come up with an idea based on what you’ve encountered...

You are treating a 60kg patient for a laceration, which you will need to suture under local anaesthetic. Given that the maximum safe dose of lignocaine is 3mg/kg, what is the maximum volume of a lignocaine 1% weight per volume (w/v) solution that can be administered safely? A.   180µL B.   6mL C.   1.8mL D.   18mL   More HPAT practice questions and resources are available.   Solution: mL = milli litres ; µL = micro litres 1 litre = 1000 mL = 1 kg = 1000 g 1% weight per volume (w/v) solution means 1 litre has 0.01 kg of lignocaine...

HPAT advice: Analysing a HPAT question To analyse, you must look closely at a problem, break it down into parts and understand how they all fit together. It is important to develop a way of keeping track of the mechanics of the problem so that you can recall how everything fits together as you work through long problems or a problem with several associated questions. This can be done through writing out a formula on the side of the problem, drawing little mind maps or diagrams, underlining key phrases or simply putting a line through what you have already worked...

Absorbing and recalling all of the information that you need from the passages you are given in HPAT section 2 can be quite difficult, however there are ways to tackle these long and dense passages so that you are able to process them and extract the important information more efficiently and effectively and thus improve your section 2 HPAT score. One of the best ways to process section 2 stimuli is to break the paragraph down into simpler forms through paraphrasing. This means that long and complex paragraphs are simplified into smaller and simpler pieces of information. Good readers will...

A starting guide on how to tackle HPAT multi-choice   from the team at MedEntry HPAT preparation:   •           The '2 out of 4' rule in multi-choice: In any multi-choice test, it is significantly harder to create a good but incorrect answer than it is to create the correct answer. For this reason usually only two attractive answer-choices are offered. One correct; the other either intentionally misleading or only partially correct. The other three answer-choices are usually 'fluff'. This makes educated guessing on tests immensely effective. If you can dismiss the two fluff choices, your probability...

Process of Elimination or POE in HPAT: the  best  of a  bad bunch.       Comprehensive advice from the team at  MedEntry HPAT preparation.   Once you have established  what the HPAT question  is asking you need to act efficiently and narrow down your options to reach the correct answer. Using the Process of Elimination or POE method can greatly improve your chances of scoring highly on the HPAT because it provides a way of tackling questions where there seems to be no ideal answer. Firstly , be wary of simply picking what you perceive, at first glance, to be the correct answer....

comprehensive UMAT advice from the team at  MedEntry HPAT preparation.   What you need to know about percentage % questions before starting your HPAT preparation:       Problems involving percent are common on the HPAT. The word  percent  means "divided by one hundred." When you see the word "percent," or the symbol %, remember it means 1/100. For example, 25 Percent   25 x 1/100 = 1/4 To convert a decimal into a percent, move the decimal point two places to the right. For example, 0.25 = 25%   0.023 = 2.3%   1.3 = 130% Conversely, to convert...

comprehensive UMAT advice from the team at  MedEntry HPAT preparation.       Probability questions in the HPAT: you're probably reading this sentence right now...   We know what probability means, but what is its formal definition? Let's use our everyday logic to define it. If there is no chance that an event will occur, then its probability of occurring should be 0. On the other extreme, if an event is certain to occur, then its probability of occurring should be 100%, or 1. Hence, we can deduce that  probability will be a number between 0 and 1, inclusive. But what...

Counting problems in HPAT: an essential summary. Your HPAT questions explained by the team at MedEntry  as part of our new section  HPAT test tactics and preparation.     They may seem simple on paper, but counting problems contained within the HPAT exam can often cause much confusion among students. If you can understand the basic principles of counting problems and recognize when to apply them, you will be able to master many of the typical counting problem question types presented in the HPAT exam.   When counting elements that are in overlapping sets, the total number will equal the number in one group plus the number...

comprehensive HPAT advice from the team at  MedEntry HPAT preparation .   How to approach statistics problems on the HPAT exam: Frequently a feature of HPAT multi choice, understanding the language of statistics and how to answer those questions involving statistics on the HPAT exam is essential for HPAT success. Below, we have explained, as succinctly as possible, what you need to know in order to answer this style of  HPAT question. Statistics is the study of the patterns and relationships of numbers and data. There are four main concepts that may appear on the HPAT exam. Median When a...

Worded mathematical problems on the HPAT exam: translating worded problems into mathematical symbols. Comprehenisve HPAT advice from the team at MedEntry HPAT preparation. Possibly the most confusing questions on the HPAT exam, worded mathematical problems can actually be solved relatively easily if you understand how the question is written and what the words of the question really mean in mathematical terms. Prior to solving worded mathematical problems on the HPAT exam, it is essential that you are comfortable with translating words into mathematical symbols. Below is a partial list of words and their mathematical equivalents. You should know these by heart...

As you complete more and more practice HPAT exams you may start to notice the following HPAT trend: Easy HPAT questions have obvious and popular answers, whilst hard HPAT questions have unexpected and unpopular answers. It helps to think of HPAT questions as popularity contests. The answer to an easy question is the most popular choice. The answer to a difficult question is the least popular choice. In other words, popular HPAT answer choices on difficult questions are traps. If you think about the HPAT for a moment, you’ll realise that questions have to be designed this way. Since a...