Product Description

Over the past few years there has been a shift towards a more detailed assessment of students applying to university, particularly those wishing to read medicine or dentistry. There is often nothing to chose between candidates in terms of exam results, so most universities have turned to other ways of assessing candidates' aptitudes. The UK Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT) is the latest test to be developed - it is used by the majority of UK medical and dentistry schools. The UKCAT aims to test verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning and decision analysis rather than scientific knowledge, so you can't revise for it. You can however familiarise yourself with the type of questions that will be presented in the UKCAT and learn how to answer them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28635 in Books
• Published on: 2009-04-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

From the Back Cover

how to pass the ukcat

unbeatable practice for success in the united kingdom clinical aptitude test

mike bryon & jim clayden

[flash] 2009 edition

[!kp logo]

how to pass the ukcat

bryon & clayden

[!kp logo!]

the uk clinical aptitude test (ukcat) is used by the majority of uk medical schools and some dentistry schools as part of their selection procedures. although these tests cannot be revised for, they can be prepared for. by familiarizing yourself with the type of questions you may be asked you will be one step closer to fulfilling your potential and winning a place.

how to pass the ukcat will help you to work hard on your exam technique and learn how to achieve the necessary balance between speed and accuracy. it teaches you about each of the five styles of question involved and what they demand of you, showing you how to develop a winning approach and get the results you want. written by testing experts mike bryon and jim clayden it contains 600 up-to-date, highly relevant practice questions for the ukcat subtests. it also offers mini tests so you can practice under realistic test conditions against the clock. you won’t find another book that offers so many practice questions with answers and full explanations on:

•           verbal reasoning;

•           decision analysis;

•           quantitative reasoning;

•           abstract reasoning;

About the Author
Mike Bryon is an expert in psychometrics and training solutions. He is also the author of The Advanced Numeracy Test Workbook, How to Pass Graduate Psychometric Tests, How to Pass the Civil Service Qualifying Tests, How to Pass Selection Tests, How to Pass Technical Selection Tests and The Ultimate Psychometric Test Book all published by Kogan Page.

Customer Reviews

Not utterly useless, but almost
I bought this book having already purchased (and exhausted) the excellent Oliver Picard UKCAT practice book. The first few pages detail the finer points of booking a UKCAT, contain advice on the best type of study plan to implement and offer very useful foresight into what candidates can expect from the test, how scores are calculated and how medical schools may use the results. The rest of the book is divided up into five sections, each section being sub-divided into three further sections comprising of "introductory questions" and "mini-tests". At the very back of the book are the solutions to each of the questions.

The first eight pages of the book are very useful, with one exception. The book advises to "Avoid a bad start", saying that "Get the first few questions wrong and the computer-adaptive test will present you with easier questions and you will struggle to get back to the level expected by many institutions." According to the UKCAT administrators, this is not the case. This piece of irresponsible and unfounded scare-mongering sadly sets the tone for the rest of the book.

I will start with what I consider to be the biggest problem first; the errors. In the abstract reasoning mini-tests, no fewer than half the sets of shapes contain errors that render the relationship described in the answers section incorrect. In one case, the relationship for a given set of shapes is described in the answers section as "all shapes have 15 sides". In the actual set, some of them do have fifteen, some of them do not, making the relationship the candidate is supposed to discern utterly impenetrable. As I said, HALF of the sets of shapes in the mini-tests contain such errors and many of the introductory questions do also.

Moving on, the introduction to the quantitative reasoning section of the book is an interesting piece of prose: "The questions in this chapter start easily and rapidly become more difficult at a level equivalent to an A level standard, not simply the "good GCSE" as described by Pearson". The "good GCSE" refers to the Pearson VUE website, the organisation that administers the UKCAT, and is the standard they themselves declare the quantitative reasoning section of the test to be set at. What reason, then, could the authors of this book have to set it higher? "You are aiming to get into a competitive field in a numerical subject; you need this ability with numbers". It seems that the authors of this book have taken it upon themselves to decide what qualities make a good doctor, although none of them are actually doctors themselves, and have declared medicine to be a "numerical subject". Anyone who thinks medicine is a numerical subject clearly does not know medicine and any UKCAT books that do not follow the guidelines on the UKCAT website are clearly following something else.

The errors in the quantitative reasoning section of the book are not nearly so many as in the abstract reasoning section but they are nevertheless infuriating and range from error in calculation, error in data representation and error in syntax. In addition, this book makes use of median, mode and mean averages as well as square root and power calculations. The UKCAT does not test these skills.

The decision analysis section of the book presents codes in an entirely different way from the UKCAT: It uses only numbers to represent words, the UKCAT uses Roman and Greek letters, numbers and miscellaneous symbols. This book presents a choice of four answers for each question, the UKCAT presents five. What's more, the UKCAT also reverses the code for some questions; asking the candidate to encode a piece of prose, and to suggest useful additions to the given code in order to communicate a particular phrase. This book makes no mention of this.

The verbal reasoning section of the book has the least wrong with it, quantifiably. It is impossible to say definitively that there are errors with any of the answers as this test is essentially a matter of opinion but it is possible to say that some of the passages given as examples are so poorly written as to be near incomprehensible. Take this wonderfully punctuation-oblivous extract on asparagus, for example: "In the spring the plant send up the spears that if left will open to form new foliage but for the first six weeks of each season these are cut when they are around 10 centimeters tall." The real UKCAT extracts are error-free and punctuation used so as to aid meaning, not abate it. Also, this book asks only three questions per extract, the UKCAT asks four. The extracts are far too short with the ones in the actual UKCAT being three or four times the length of the ones in this book.

Finally, the book contains a section with non-cognitive analysis practice questions. This could be helpful, but the questions vary considerably from the ones in the actual UKCAT.

I will not, for the sake of not wishing to be libelous, pass judgement upon the ethics of those who would produce such a poorly researched, poorly tested and largely irrelevant book. I will leave that decision up to whoever reads this. The majority of those who want to become doctors do so with absolute abandon. The calling to medicine is a powerful and worthy one, and students know that the stumbling blocks along the way must be approached with steadfast determination and preparedness. The questions in this book bear very little resemblance to the questions in the UKCAT and, when approached by an earnest student, will most likely add to feelings of apprehensiveness and confusion as to the types of question likely to be faced.

Through incorrect information, poorly constructed questions, poor copy-checking and poor question testing, this book takes your time, energy and money and offers so staggeringly little in return. In producing this book, the authors espouse none of the qualities I would want in a doctor, and many that I would not want. This is not a tool to help in becoming a doctor, it's not even a tool in getting through the UKCAT.

Don't bother
This book is only good for practicing questions which are remotely similar in format to the UKCAT. The level of difficulty is far from that on the official UKCAT site. There are quite a few incomplete questions and data sets, typos and sometimes incomprehensible assumptions. I found answers in the quantitative section which are plainly wrong and am putting this down to typos. And that is in addition to the shortcomings in the verbal section mentioned in the other reviews. Some of the patterns in the abstract section are way out there.

UKCAN'T
Although this book is mildly useful for some of the more mathematical based sections of the exam, the awful verbal reasoning tests make it beyond useless. There are many mistakes and ambiguities in the articles upon which the questions are based, which in itself should put most people off, but there are then questions about these mistakes which in turn are wrong because the "authors" are too linguistically inept or factually deprived. For example, one question asks if the article writer would be better served saying "inward migration" instead of "immigration" and the answer is supposedly "yes", because 'immigration' means the movement of people, regardless of whether it's inward or outward. Last time I checked, that was the definition of 'migration', hence having two further words; 'immigration' and 'emigration'. Other questions leave answers very ambiguous, but then unjustifiably claim that the answer must be one of the two potential choices, when clearly it could be either. They can't even proofread their own articles properly to see how just how incompetent they are. Making a mistake is fine, but then compounding a mistake by basing questions on your incompetencies is unforgivable. It's rare to find a question in this section without a mistake somewhere.

This may seem like a petit quibble, but for a book trying to show people how to answer these types of questions, it can't be at all trusted if they can't even write questions correctly.