Napoleon Bonaparte once famously said “an army marches on its stomach”, and that is as relevant for HPAT as it was for the French Armies that Bonaparte commanded. Making sure you put the right things into your body in the lead up to HPAT is vital to making sure that you perform well on the day of the test. I’m sure you are well aware of what a quality diet consists, so in this post I’ll serve up a couple of key tips for the immediate lead up to test day. The Night Before: As you would expect, the night before...

HPAT is well and truly close now and it’s time to streamline your study and buckle down! Here are five ways to make sure you’re using the next two weeks to set you up for success on HPAT day. 1. Use your practice exams wisely A practice exam is only a practice exam if you’re doing it in exam conditions. HPAT is a marathon and your MedEntry and ACER exams are your trial runs so use them to recreate HPAT as much as you possibly can. HPAT isn’t just about the questions, it’s about building your stamina, working on your time...

The HPAT is so commonly viewed as a test of intelligence and aptitude, that we forget how crucial it is to improve our mental endurance for this exam. In fact, the endurance required for the HPAT is much greater than that required for any end of year school exam. Not only is the HPAT as long as or longer than any school exam (2.5 hours), but the nature of each individual question requires much greater focus. This need for enhanced application to each question is due to our inability to draw upon a year’s worth of content and knowledge, as is...

Yes, we’d all rather be on Facebook or YouTube, or twitter, or asos, but before you throw your hands up in exasperated defeat and open another tab in your internet browser, consider this…    If you do well in the HPAT exam, you will only have to sit it once. It’s 3 hours of your time which can open the door to a lifelong, rewarding and satisfying career in medicine and/or the health sciences.    If you do not study for the HPAT, you may have to re-sit it or be forced find alternative pathways to reach your health career goal....

In the game of HPAT practice, consistency beats brilliance. It is important that we not wait until we have lots of motivation before we start practicing. Good HPAT skills come about in the context of practicing in a more routine and ordinary manner, rather than sporadic bursts of insight. The goal should be gaining meaningful and valuable HPAT skills every time you practice. Expecting anything more may create too much pressure and lead to debilitating blocks and limitations. To be successful at the HPAT, you need to develop HPAT practice as a practice or discipline. HPAT = Meditation? In this sense,...

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 ultimately...

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 have...

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 worst...

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 immeasurably...

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 is...

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 HPAT-related...

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...

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 is...

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 preparation...

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 in...

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 there?...

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 through...

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 point...

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 read....

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 ticking: ...