MedEntry Blog

To some lucky people it comes easy, but for many this is the section with some of the most difficult questions in the exam. Whether you are just starting your HPAT preparation or are deep in your practice so far, the following tips from an experienced tutor who scored highly in this section should help you maximize your score: Firstly, read the introductory text included in the passage.  • This appears before the actual body of the passage and is often written in italics or brackets. Although this may seem like an obvious tip, many students don’t take the time to...

Sometimes it can feel like the HPAT has got nothing to do with being a doctor. It can feel like just another one of the oddly-shaped hoops one must jump through in the medical entry process. However, this mindset that the UMAT is just a barrier to doctor-hood can be demotivating and counterproductive. In this post, I’ll give some real life examples of how each section of the UMAT relates to skills I’ve had to develop in medical school, and how UMAT preparation is related to, or perhaps even beneficial to, the study of medicine. Section 1: Logical Reasoning and...

With the exception of the Non-Verbal Reasoning component (section three), HPAT is primarily comprised of written – rather than pictorial – questions. Thus, it stands to reason that your HPAT preparation should include improving your reading skills. With that in mind, here are some of the many strategies you can use to develop your reading efficiency for HPAT.  Firstly, you must ensure that you read every single component of the stimulus, particularly for section two (Understanding People). A past HPAT stimulus, for example, described a middle-aged man. This information was included in the introductory stem of the stimulus, but nowhere...

Medicine is largely a people-oriented career, which is one of the reasons HPAT tests how well you can understand people in a personal and professional setting. Whilst you can try to “study” for this section of the exam, the best way to develop and refine your interpersonal skills leading up to the HPAT is via emotional reflection and understanding certain concepts. ‘Understanding People’ questions will frequently require you to assign a specific emotion a person might be feeling at a given time. This blog will cover how to approach such a question methodically, in various steps.   STEP 1: Recognise...

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...

The passages that you are required to read and understand in the HPAT can be long and dense. Absorbing enough information from the passages to answer the questions can be difficult and your brain will not be able to recall all the information that you read from a passage. However, passages can be broken down into simpler forms to help you better process and recall the passages when it comes to answering the questions. Passages may be simplified using paraphrasing. This helps transform the big, complex paragraphs and passages into small bite-sized pieces of information. Good readers paraphrase as they...