The Importance of Practice in Study

One of the most common questions I get asked as a tutor is “how much time should I be spending per week on UCAT?”. It’s a valid question, because while most universities claim to not overvalue UCAT’s role in the process, it remains undeniably the most common way to decide who gets an interview and who doesn’t.

From an outside view, that’s fair – universities want to have their interviews done just as the school year ends, and not crammed between ATAR releases and offer rounds. But it means that the shadow of taking UCAT looms over the first half of the year, a terrifying presence that only grows the more time goes by.

I remember the morning of my UCAT, going to the bathroom at 7:30 and being hit with the sudden realisation that this one exam might dictate the path of the rest of my life. Scary stuff for an eighteen-year-old.

Because of that, it might seem natural to drop everything in Term 2 and devote all your time to prepping UCAT. After all, you only get one shot at it, right? Whereas with ATAR, a decent amount is done months before or long after, in the external exams in Term 4.

It’s definitely the mentality that kids at my school had, even me. In my last blog, I mentioned that I did a mock exam every day of the Term 2 holidays. But I didn’t mention that throughout the term, I was slowly weaving UCAT practice into my school timetable – before form class, at lunchtimes, even between chunks of study. I was doing QR questions instead of integration in my math class.

It was, at minimum, five times more than I was doing last term. And every one of my friends who was sitting UCAT with me was doing the exact same. I remember one morning when we had two free periods, I pulled up to an upstairs study room to see eight boys sitting around one table, all locked in on DM syllogisms. It was lowkey cult behaviour.

My mum has a saying that she liked to throw around when I was younger: “let the results speak for themselves.” Usually, she was referring to flexing my results to other parents. However, in this case, the results are all that matter.

The question you should be asking yourself is not “how much am I practicing per week?”

The question you should be asking is, “how much am I improving each week?”

Because the thing with UCAT is, you can put a hundred hours into practicing one subsection and still see no improvement at all. It’s a familiar feeling, when you do a mock after hundreds of questions only to see you’re still getting 750/900. Some people continue practicing like this. Some people are smart enough to realise that practice alone isn’t enough.

In my case, practice didn’t change the fact that my visualisation of syllogism definitions was too slow. Practice didn’t change that my mental calculations on QR were occasionally wrong or fix the fact that I despised AR and mentally convinced myself I couldn’t improve.

That’s not to say practice is bad. No one takes the UCAT without practice and comes close to scoring 900/900. But there are roadblocks in each of the subsections, challenges that will withstand any attempt at brute forcing them and can only be solved with a strategy change.

Verbal Reasoning is a perfect example of this. Many of my students have told me they’ve done countless mini-mocks and still find themselves running out of time and getting scores in the 28/44 range. That’s because VR, at its core, can’t be solved with normal reading comprehension techniques like in ICAS or NAPLAN. There’s just not enough time. All systems have limits, and there is a point where your strategy can be practiced to death and still not work for you. That doesn’t mean you’ve haven’t been practicing enough. That means your strategy needs to change.

One of the first things I teach people is to ignore the temptation to read the text and instead skim read diagonally across paragraphs. Other strategies, like compartmentalisation and keyword scanning, are also designed to save you time. So is good practice just practice, but using a good strategy?

That brings me to another important aspect of practice – concentration. When you practice questions and implement any form of strategy, you need to be in consciously aware of your own mind. Are you actually practicing the techniques you need? Or are you just slipping back into default settings and hitting the ‘switch to untimed mode’ when it pops up?

I remember one math lesson where I spent forty minutes alt-tabbing between OneNote and Medify on my browser, trying to do VR questions in between my teacher’s patrol route. At the time, I felt like I’d spent forty minutes practicing, but in reality I probably achieved very little. I wasn’t really doing VR – I was doing an online reading comprehension test at 10% of my concentration.

UCAT practice is like learning to ride a bike at the top speed. If you’re holding the handlebars wrong, you could spend a hundred hours practicing and never get there. You also wouldn’t cycle around a school zone at 5km/h for two hours and call that good practice.

Swapping to a new technique can still be jarring. But sometimes, we have to unlearn what we have learned.