MedEntry Blog

This impending Saturday is without a doubt one of the most terrifying – yet unusual days of the year. Throughout the past years, I have uttered the phrase “The HPAT is a game” innumerous times, and now, on the brink of becoming an actual doctor (finally!) and exiting the world of HPAT, I thought I’d pass on my suggestions for this game. Suggestion 1: Your mood is your top priority. The HPAT is designed in such a way that your mood greatly impacts your performance. Why? Because it’s an exam of emotions, of empathy and of understanding. Feeling stressed/anxious/overwhelmed will...

Students often find non-verbal reasoning questions the most difficult initially, especially if they have never encountered them before. Here are a few tips to help tackle these questions from an experienced HPAT tutor.  Tip 1: Keep it Simple. Non-verbal reasoning questions will require you to find the most simple and logical answer. It may feel like the questions are out to trick you, and that may lead to you trialling overly complex rules. However, in many situations, the simple pattern is the correct pattern. Having this in mind will help form your approach to the questions. For example, if you...

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. – Mark Twain Brian Tracy’s 5 minute YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKOMTZ7PPLg  discusses a time management strategy that has changed many people’s lives (including mine!). It discusses time management in the context of the workplace, but the strategy is applicable to HPAT and high school/university study too. This blog summarises the key points.  As Mark Twain said, if the first thing you do in the morning is to eat a live frog, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that’s probably the...

Your final year is a juggling act between all-important tests and exams with your other commitments, be it sport, music or a part-time job. On top of this, you have to squeeze in quality time for your family, friends and personal relationships. Well, once you leave this final year, you may find the added pressures of medical school can be overwhelming at times! Here are my trialled-and-tested tips for reining in the chaos that University can be at times. Honestly, if someone had given me these three pointers in my first few weeks at university, it would have made the transition...

From the moment you first hear stories of the HPAT and how difficult it can be until the first step you take to enter that exam centre, only you can decide the mind set and approach that will embody your HPAT experience. There are two ways to view this exam; either as a roadblock that is there to hinder you on the path to success or simply a stepping stone towards getting you into your dream career. In the end, which viewpoint you adopt is up to you.   A distinct point that is often conveyed when describing the HPAT...

Have I prepared enough for HPAT? As school assessments begin to pile up and the date of the HPAT exam looms closer, this one question can create great anxiety. As a MedEntry workshop helper, questions like, “when did you start preparing for the HPAT?” and “how much practice did you do every night?” are amongst the most frequent that I receive. With such a high-stakes exam like the HPAT, it can often feel like no amount of preparation is enough. This feeling can become increasingly dominant as the exam approaches, and you may find yourself ‘hitting a wall’ with your...

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...

Keeping the balance is something we all struggle with in our final year of schooling, myself included. At the commencement of the year, I jumped into everything. Then, at the end of term one, I crashed, and in term two I tried to do nothing. Neither of these worked for me, and over the remainder of the year I learnt some important lessons about keeping the balance. Not only was I happier and more well-rounded as a result, I was also able to succeed in both HPAT and in my final exams.     The golden rule for staying well-rounded...

The new LMS provides even easier access to your HPAT video guides. Simply click on the blue ‘Video Guides’ icon under the ‘Learn’ category to access all of your HPAT preparation video guides. On the LMS you will find video guides that cover all three HPAT sections: Logical Reasoning and Problem Solving, Understanding People and Non-Verbal Reasoning. You will also find specific guides covering particular types of question, for example, Pick the Middle, Missing Segment, and the new Transformation type of question in the Non-Verbal Reasoning section. Challenging concepts in HPAT will be tackled and explained in detail. These HPAT...

Rather than assessing your knowledge, the HPAT is an exam which isolates certain deductive skills that will be important in work as a doctor and requires you to apply them in various scenarios. Therefore, if you wish to succeed in the HPAT, you will need to nurture these skills, sharpen them and know exactly when to use them. If your eager mind has begun this uphill climb towards HPAT success and if you have thoroughly scoured the LMS and still seek ways to better your logical reasoning, this guide will show you how.   Logical Reasoning & Problem Solving questions...

This article is written from the point of view of a student sitting the UMAT, which is the Australian/New Zealand equivalent of the HPAT. The main difference is that the UMAT is 134 questions and 3 hours long with the 3 constructs blended. So you HPAT students just keep that in mind as you read on................. If you’re a student who likes being prepared and in control, you’ve probably tried to imagine what the actual day of the UMAT will be like. You might be asking yourself some of the following questions – How early do I need to get...

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...

The five essential qualities of a superior HPAT Ulster essay: When critiquing your HPAT Ulster essays, there are generally five basic elements that you need to have included to some extent in order to have written a comprehensive and engaging HPAT Ulster essay. To assist you, we've outlined several HPAT Ulster essay tips below. HPAT Ulster essay tip 1:  Interesting, relevant and consistent point of view in your HPAT Ulster essay Do you take a thoughtful and interesting position on the issue of the HPAT Ulster essay topic ?   Do you answer the HPAT Ulster essay topic as it is presented?   Do you maintain a consistent...

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...

Below are a few useful tips as to how to stay in control during the HPAT.  Distractions: One of the things you'll probably have to deal with during the HPAT is distractions. This may be someone sniffling, or coughing, or tapping a pencil. In fact there have even been stories of distractions ranging from pile drivers at a nearby construction site to the school's symphonic band practicing outside!  The most important thing is to not let these distractions get to you, use them as a reminder to get back to the HPAT in front of you.  Keep moving while the clock is...

Your HPAT scores depend on how much you know, but they also depend on  how well you can apply what you know.  If you are nervous, distracted, or in a bad mood during the HPAT, you may have a hard time concentrating and harnessing your knowledge. Here are some basic tips to help you control your nerves on the day of the HPAT.  Think Positively.  This tip cannot be emphasized enough. Getting down on yourself during the test does more than make you feel bad during the HPAT! In fact, it is taking away your body's support system. If you are...

-            For the few weeks before the test, if not longer, you've been preoccupied with the HPAT. Maybe you've let a few things slide: homework, co-curricular activities, your friends, fun. Now it's time to catch up on anything that's fallen behind and to return to your normal routine after the HPAT.    We know you may be feeling a little anti-climactic after getting all geared up for the HPAT that's now over, but don't forget other tests that may be looming on the horizon. You've worked hard preparing for the HPAT and it's natural to want to relax a bit. But please, please don't blow off your Year 12 exams; they are just...

Are you having a hard time motivating yourself to study for the HPAT? The tools we often reach for when we need to get ourselves moving are carrots (rewarding ourselves once a tough job is done) or sticks (depriving ourselves of something we want if we fail to do it). These are "extrinsic rewards". But such  extrinsic  rewards and punishments are not as effective as  intrinsic  ones. Intrinsic rewards come from your own person - you believe that if you do a certain thing, it will make you a better, more knowledgable person.  Here, six ways to find the intrinsic...

Your HPAT scores depend on how much you know, but they also depend on  how well you can apply what you know.  If you are nervous, distracted, or in a bad mood during the HPAT, you may have a hard time concentrating and harnessing your knowledge. Here are some basic tips to help you control your nerves on the day of the HPAT.  Think Positively.  This tip cannot be emphasized enough. Getting down on yourself during the test does more than make you feel bad during the HPAT! In fact, it is taking away your body's support system. If you...

Here are some useful tips MedEntry has for you the morning of the HPAT:  When you wake up on the day of the HPAT, consider taking a shower or doing some brief exercise to get the blood flowing.  If your parent, guardian, friend or relative is taking you to the HPAT, make sure they are up too.  Eat a normal breakfast on the morning of the HPAT, by that we mean eat whatever you eat normally for breakfast. You don't want to eat too much, or something that you don't normally eat as it may upset your stomach or cause...