One thing I found extremely useful on the days coming up to, and the day of the HPAT was the knowledge that I was confident with my exam timing. Whilst you have no control over the questions that will appear on the HPAT on the day, you have complete control over your timing. This sense of control can help to ease your nerves on the day of the exam, and prove extremely useful in keeping calm throughout the HPAT. Time management also increases the chance of you finishing the HPAT exam… remember, if you do not attempt a question you have...

Should I prepare for the HPAT with friends or alone?  It’s a question many students ask themselves leading up to a major exam, including the HPAT. Although the answer will vary depending on personal preference, this article will endeavour to discuss some of the benefits and drawbacks of both group and individual preparation. For most, the answer lies somewhere between the two – ideal preparation involves a combination of both individual and group work. Tackling practice questions on your own is an essential part of preparation. In the exam, you won’t have a group of friends with which to discuss the question...

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 else....

Many of the personal qualities that the HPAT aims to assess in prospective medical students are the same qualities that are required to be a good doctor. Whilst the HPAT can only assess what you put on a paper in multiple choice format; the medical interview that will follow, can look for these qualities in person.    Your choice of words, body language, attitude and way of thinking will all be up for examination in the medical interview. Without some internal self-reflection, you will not be able to paint a detailed enough picture of yourself. A lot of these qualities we...

For many students, HPAT preparation begins with enrolling in a HPAT tuition program such as MedEntry. But boy, there sure is a lot of stuff on here, isn’t there? How exactly should you use all of the resources, such as Practice Exams, Drills and Eureka? In this post, I’ll share how I navigated the MedEntry LMS to ultimately achieve 100th percentile in the HPAT.   The HPAT is such an important of your application to medical school. Obviously it is unfeasible to spend as much time on the HPAT as you do on schoolwork, so I found that treating the HPAT...

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 paraphrase...

Coping with HPAT stress and HPAT nerves prior to the HPAT exam: We all know that sick feeling in the bottom of our stomachs just prior to walking into a big exam; we’re jittery, shaking and generally thinking that we’d rather be anywhere else but here. Nerves can be debilitating in the most terrible way for even the brightest of students. Thus, it is crucially important that your learn to overcome these HPAT nerves before the actual day of the HPAT test so that you can perform at your peak and ultimately succeed in the HPAT. How do I know if...