Scoring in the top 1% for BMAT Course

How to get the highest score in the BMAT?

When I sat the BMAT, I managed to get one of the highest scores in the country, managing to get offers from some of the top universities in the country. To help you get a good score and get your place at university, I’m giving some tips, tricks and techniques that helped me with when I was revising.

How is the BMAT structured?

The BMAT is a 2 hour exam split into 3 sections. Section 1 is 60 mins long and it tests your aptitude and skills. Section 2 tests your science and mathematics knowledge; lasting for 30 mins. Lastly, section 3 is an essay section, lasting for the remaining 30 mins. It is a standard pen and paper exam so sitting it will seem familiar to other exams you would have sat in the past such as GCSEs or A Levels. As for equipment, all you are allowed is a pen. There is no calculator for this exam.

Revision Ethic

Generally, when it comes to revising, there are some key features you should keep in mind for the most effective outcome. Overall culminating in a good revision ethic or revising hygiene: First and foremost, structure your revision; take the time to set out all the sections and types of questions that you may come across in the exam or past papers/questions that you have access to. At first, this may seem like something which will affect your revision very lightly however, on any certain day, you will already know what you will be doing and you will have an idea about what materials you will need for the day . Linking to structure, make sure that you plan out breaks and exercise. There is no use in revising solidly for a block amount of time if it leads you to burning out and not taking in information. That’s just a waste of time!.Breaks will allow your brain to have a soft reset and get ready to take in more information. 3 hours of well structured and efficient revision is much better than 6 hours on inefficient revision. Exercise is generally important to your health and surprising can make a massive difference to your overall confidence and ability to take in information. I’d try to get in around 40 mins of exercise a day for you to see an impact to revision. The last major part of a good revision ethic is making sure you are in a different environment. Dedicating another space away from your room will naturally put you in a different mindset for revising and will motivate you to try out questions or attempt a paper. This could be in your local library, sitting on the grass in a park or even just another space in your house which isn’t somewhere you spend most of your time. It’s really good to separate your home and your work!

Section 1 Tips

Make sure you read the question first and then go through the context of the question to look for the answer. Entrance exams are very time pressured and any method where you can save time on a question will be useful. In this case, identifying key parts of the question and parsing through the given context to find the answer will be much more efficient than just reading all the information given and then answering the questions. Practice doing lots of calculations in your head or quickly writing them down to solve. These calculations should be percentage calculations, speed-time calculations or converting units as these are the key calculations that can come up in section 1. Reducing the time it will take for you to do these calculations will allow you extra time on questions later on which may require some more thinking or working out Read the question carefully or if you need to read the question more than once. It may contain key words which can affect the answer you select; you may miss them if you go too quickly. Examiners tend to use one word in either the context or the question which can dramatically change the meaning of what is is saying or asking; this then leads to students making easily rectifiable mistakes Test out all the given answers if it is easier than figuring out the methodology behind the question. If you are struggling to identify how you are supposed to do a question, go through each of the answers and see if it fits. This can be a major time saving measure and can stop you from losing time if you’re prone to panicking.

Section 2 Tips

Do not neglect physics! The order of difficulty, from highest to lowest, for questions tends to follow this pattern; Biology, Chemistry, Maths, Physics. Physics questions tend to be easier objectively because applicants are less likely to have taken Physics as a subject and examiners know this. The number of physics questions are about 25% of all the questions in section 2 so it is a very significant amount of marks that you could be risking if you don’t brush up. Try to look back through GCSE specifications for Physics and see what you can do and try to learn the fundamentals Be confident with your science subjects that you are taking. This can help you in two regards Firstly, it will help you consolidate all the learning you would have done up to this point and highlight areas that you need to focus on. Secondly, section 2 questions can involve AS level questions from time to time so having a deeper knowledge of your sciences can alleviate any hurdles that examiners may try to throw at you in the exam. Practice past papers! Section 2 questions may seem a little unorthodox in the way they are structured or the way they may ask you to solve something; this can lead you to be taken by surprise in the exam. Reading all the previous questions that students have undertaken will allow you to see how the exam board implements the science you already know in a different manner for these questions. Getting used to the questions is good for any section but especially good for this one.

Section 3 Tips

Take the time to plan! 30 mins really isn’t a long time so it would seem very counterintuitive to spend what limited time you have on planning but trust me, it’s worth it. Examiners don’t care how long the essay is, so long it has the necessary parts needed to answer the statement and that the overall piece is well structured. You are being examined on the quality of the argument, not the length; so spending 5-10 mins planning what you will write so that it’s clear and coherent will be a massive advantage. Due to the limited space you have to write this section, it is worth planning on the back of the answer sheet so you have the full amount of space to write what you need to Don’t fuss over the question, just choose what you think you can build the best piece of writing around. Some people may say that you should choose the question which seems the most difficult to answer, usually the question that involves philosophy but in actuality, the examiners don’t care. They are just looking for a quality argument, not what topic you have chosen. It doesn’t give you any extra marks or credit so just choose what you feel comfortable with.

Hopefully some of the tips I have given will help you attain the best score you can achieve in the exam and boost your confidence! Good luck!