For many people, seeking test prep tuition is a matter of course. That's especially true in during Year 12 courses because competition for high Australian Tertiary Admissions ratings (ATAR) is fierce. Everyone wants to earn the highest possible score so they can increase their chances of landing their top-listed university study program. Who would consider needing formal tutoring after high school?
It's not all downhill from there. After you're done with high school courses, you still have many trials ahead of you. You might need a peer-tutor's help or tutorials from an online message board. Those guides won't be able to help you much, if at all, when preparing for your Graduate Medical School Admissions Test (GAMSAT) ordeal.
You need a tough but caring taskmaster. Someone who can paint vivid pictures of what's ahead and keep you from driving yourself mad about it. Someone who's been where you're at now and is willing to share all they know. In short, you need a GAMSAT tutor.
A GAMSAT Tutor Brings Staying Power
Compared to the University Clinical Aptitude Test (UCAT), the exam that high schoolers take to gain access to undergraduate medical study programs, your GAMSAT is far more rigorous. We can overlook the 'graduate' part of this exam's name; it has nothing to do with you being required to have Graduate-level knowledge. Indeed, students sit this exam to enrol in medical school at the graduate level.
To be clear, GAMSAT candidates have to have to know their undergraduate-level science. They have to remember their high school physics curriculum; some of that will feature on the exam, too. But overwhelmingly, this ordeal challenges how you think, process information and communicate what you know. These skills are innate, but only to an extent. They must be called forth and cultivated.
All of that takes time. More importantly, it takes a skilled master to coax your as-yet-undiscovered talents out. Much like Yoda showed Luke Skywalker how to find and develop his powers, your GAMSAT tutor will show you how to hone your reasoning and communication skills. However, unlike that fictional character, your tutor won't occasionally lose their temper or tell you to leave if you can't handle the challenge.
That's because they know what it takes to make it through the GAMSAT. More importantly, they'll keep you on track as you develop those vital skills. And best of all, they keep you organised and focused on your task.
Assessing your strengths and probing for where you need the most development will likely fill your first couple of learning sessions. Once your tutor knows roughly where you're at in your development as a higher-order thinker, they will recommend an optimal learning plan. You might agree that going over all of the exam's academic materials first is the best course of action. Or you might start every session with a quick biology or chemistry quiz.
Your GAMSAT tutor may assign you a text to read from which you should distil the most salient information. They'll likely have you condense it into an essay, as is required on the exam. That will help them gauge your writing capabilities and reading comprehension.
All of this will fit into your revision schedule. Dedicating a daily block of time to revision should be a part of the learning plan you set up early in your tuition. For instance, your tutor might recommend that, on Monday, you learn and practice graph interpretation, a skill needed for the exam's biology component. On Tuesday, you build your vocabulary. You'll need an expansive lexicon to express yourself well in writing. On Wednesday...
Revising for your GAMSAT exam with a tutor gives you a framework of accountability. You might procrastinate or work only halfheartedly on your own. But you're less likely to neglect your studies when you're paying for tutorials. Not only will your tutor keep you motivated, but they'll keep you on task, too. GAMSAT tutors have serious staying power!
GAMSAT Tutoring Reinforces Academic Knowledge
Just a bit ago, we touched on graph interpretation and vocabulary building. We also mentioned writing skills and the sciences you'll need to know - biology, chemistry and physics. You'll also have to know a bit of maths. But knowing about all of that is only half the battle. You also need to know how to apply that knowledge.
That begs the question: apply it to what? Your GAMSAT tutor is uniquely qualified to answer it. They know how the exam questions are written. Some are straightforward and others are more difficult simply because of the way they're phrased.
Here, GAMSAT candidates run into a conundrum. If you overthink a straightforward question, you might miss the answer. On the other hand, if you don't train yourself to think at varying levels of complexity, you won't recognise the more complex questions' intent.
Fortunately, your GAMSAT tutor has the solution. The best tutors already have question banks built up to challenge their pupils in just this manner. They might pose the same question 10 different ways, all with varying degrees of complication. These exercises train you to distinguish between elaborate questions and comparatively plain ones. That way, come exam time, you'll be well-conditioned to answer any question on the test. It's a great way to work on your academic knowledge, too!
Your GAMSAT Tutor Has Resources
The Australian Council for Education Research (ACER) offers practice exams on their website. Most exam candidates aver that what's on offer simply isn't enough to score well on the exam. You might have a couple of questions per topic and some topics you know are on the exam might not feature in the mock-up. All of the questions reflect the same level of complexity. You might be tempted to treat them the way you did in high school: skim over them, partially answer them and quickly move on. That's no way to learn!
Your GAMSAT tutor has plenty of other resources besides the aforementioned question banks. Don't be surprised if they show up for your courses with a mock exam they devised in hand. They may have built decks of flashcards to help you study equations and vocabulary featured on the exam. If not, they'll surely recommend resources already available online.
They may have already created mind maps for GAMSAT topics you can review. Or better yet: you will create such maps together as you progress through your revision. If you and your GAMSAT tutor meet online, you can count on them using web-based resources like interactive whiteboards and other learning tools to enhance your sessions.
Most importantly, they may have genuine ACER preparation materials. Your internet search for GAMSAT past papers and revision resources will return plenty of sites that claim to have those materials. They may or may not be up-to-date, or even authentic. Some may charge you a fee for accessing those resources. Wouldn't it be best to head directly to the ACER site to get your authorised copy straight from the exam administrators?
Better still: wouldn't it be better for your tutor to make them available to you? If you secured your own copy, you may pick up quite a bit on your own. But that resource would be far more useful if you had a mentor who could explain everything. Having these booklets to anchor your revision and your GAMSAT tutor to guide you is the way to a top score.
Your GAMSAT Tutor Knows
Lately, we're hearing ever more about known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. It's a (highly grating!) pedestrian way to describe the Johari Window, an analytical tool some countries use to determine national security threats. Less irritatingly expressed, it amounts to: "Here's what we know, what we don't know and what we can't know based on the information available". For our purposes, only the last qualifier applies.
If you've never before undergone the GAMSAT ordeal, you can't know what it's like or what it entails. If you have undergone it but didn't succeed, you don't necessarily know where you might have lagged. In short, you don't know what you don't know. Your GAMSAT tutor knows, though.
Ideally, your GAMSAT tutor should have run that course successfully. They should have the reasoning and analytical skills to determine your potential pitfalls and the teaching skills to help you minimise them. They should have the communication skills to illustrate the exam's complexity and what distinguishes a successful candidate from a mediocre one.
You might not know where to find study resources and additional practice questions but your tutor does. You may not be able to argue both sides of an ethical debate; let your tutor take one. Along the way, they're sure to offer up points of contention you might never have thought about.
Your GAMSAT tutor will arm you with study tips so you can continue to prepare even out from under their guiding hand. They have the skills and experience to bring you to your best performance. That might just be the greatest benefit any GAMSAT tutor could give you.
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