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Medical students and doctors who join our UCAT teaching team are expert tutors. Each UCAT tutor only teaches a few sections of the UCAT that they excel on (top 10% nationally). It seems evident that the best person to teach verbal reasoning is not the exact best person to teach quantitative reasoning, yet most UCAT courses on the market have one tutor teaching all sections!
We make sure your verbal reasoning section of the UCAT course is taught by a verbal reasoning expert like Dr Siobhan Akhtar, who scored 740 in verbal reasoning. The quantitative reasoning section is led by a quantitative reasoning expert, etc.
When choosing your UCAT course, ask who teaches each section and their score! Most companies do not provide this information.
theMSAG offers the best UCAT tutors. You can read more about who they are, their teaching experience and their UCAT scores on our tutor’s page. You can also read about their 3 stage recruitment process that ensures we have tutors with outstanding UCAT scores and a genuine passion and skill for teaching.
50% of the UCAT strategies that we teach are not taught anywhere else. Is that possible or true?
Yes, it is! Aside from our expert UCAT tutors, we have an entire team that works to develop the best teaching standards. We research past UCAT questions, interview students right after their UCAT exam, analyse hundreds of elements that contribute to the passage, data and UCAT questions difficulty.
We collaborate with UCAT tutors who impress us with their unique strategies and work with them to transform their intuitive approach into a teachable method.
We have updated our decision making and quantitative reasoning strategies for the UCAT 2021 based on our recent research. We updated our verbal reasoning, abstract reasoning and situational judgement strategies for the UCAT 2020 and continued monitoring their accuracy.
Our UCAT question bank is our pride and joy at theMSAG and comes for free with the course booking. We invested over three years and all of our income during that time to build the UCAT question bank we wished we had when we applied to Medical school.
Watch our 1-minute video to learn how our UCAT question bank blends the latest technology, the highest quality content and the best teaching practices designed to help you improve your weaknesses.
The quality of the questions is second to no other question bank. Two AI experts built the technology, and the experience is seamless to simulate the real UCAT so that it feels like just another practice test on test day!
Timed practice, filters by all types of questions, tutorials, etc., are all there and if you feel a feature is missing, let us know, and we will build it.
eton • Haberdasher's Aske • Hymers
Learn the UCAT from a company with a solid track record. We have been preparing students for medical school admission since 2007. Nearly all career advisers throughout UK schools use our resources to advise their applicants on medical school applications.
We have developed excellent teaching know-how, have been finalists three years in a row for service excellence in the National SME awards, and are trusted by hundreds of schools as a trusted adviser for their medical school aspirants.
We have partnered with schools such as Harberdasher's Aske's School for Boys, Harberdasher's Aske's School for Girls, Eton College and Hymers College to deliver courses to students getting ready for medical school! Visit our Instagram to see more photos from our school events.
“I wish I had found this course last year.”
“This course truly changed my outlook on the UCAT and gave me incredible motivation and confidence.”
“Helped me change the way I approach questions and gave me more techniques to cut downtime.”
“With support from the MSAG and lots more practice, I saw my score go up from 2560 band 3 (2019) to 2860 band 1(2020).”
Our students say this! Scroll down to the bottom of the page or check us out on google to read more reviews about theMSAG UCAT course.
We offer our UCAT preparation courses in two formats:
• Two-day crash course
• Five-day course
The expert tutors, the content covered, and the structure of the course is precisely the same. The two options aim to match students’ scheduling and learning method preferences.
Our UCAT course is split into five sections, covering all sections of the UCAT. Each covers the following elements:
• An overview of the aptitude test for that section of the UCAT
• A look at common pitfalls for those not scoring highly
• A straightforward approach for all types of questions
• Strategy and tricks for tackling the questions smartly and efficiently
• UCAT practice where you answer questions using the method taught
• Mini mock UCAT test (10 minutes - timed)
• A detailed review of the mock questions, applying the strategies taught one more time to reinforce the knowledge.
The verbal reasoning section of our course lasts 3 hours. Depending on the source you read, you will see advice on reading the passage in full or scanning the keywords. We have found that neither of these is effective for a top score. From collaborating with several applicants with outstanding VR results, we observed them and analysed what they all did in common to devise our “mental mapping” strategy.
The strategy is unique to theMSAG team, created by us and only taught in our live course. Verbal reasoning is the lowest scoring section of the UCAT year on year, and our “secret” approach gives you an edge over other applicants.
The decision making strategies we teach have been reviewed and improved for 2021. We have found this to be a section where students struggle to achieve excellent scores. The variety in question types is often the culprit here. Some students do well in Venn diagrams, but not in logic puzzles or some students do well in all parts of decision making, except probabilities.
We are the only course in the UK that dedicates four whole hours to decision making review. It means we do not rush on any question type and offer you strategies and tricks that match the wide variety you can be presented with. Did you know there are four types of probability questions? Do you know how to recognise them in 5 seconds and the fastest method to solve each? This is precisely what we teach you in our decision making class.
Quantitative reasoning is the highest scoring section in the UCAT, and for this one, we usually see two types of applicants. One group is naturally gifted in Maths and can technically solve most questions - but their main struggle is timing and knowing which ones are worth doing and which ones are worth skipping.
The other group of students find solving the questions challenging on top of the timing struggle. We have developed several strategies to help both groups of applicants. We teach you how to recognise a question type within 5 seconds. For many of them, we offer a single more rapid method to solve the question. We also delve into the overall section timing strategy, how to be efficient, and how to identify where you can skip questions. A pivotal secret to scoring highly in the quantitative section is to learn when and how to estimate, which we also cover with many example questions.
The abstract reasoning section of the UCAT is the section where we see the fastest improvement in our students. The shapes are farthest from anything you may have studied in class and can feel intimidating at first. When you realise you have 15 seconds per question, the intimation can reach high proportions.
The most important part of our teaching here is our approach. Mnemonics are good not to forget anything, but always approaching a question with the same mnemonic can mean that you are not starting with the obvious, costing you precious time. Our blended approach of using mnemonic and critical tips to recognise common patterns fast sets you up to excel in abstract reasoning. We take the challenge to make this initially stressful section feel fun for you!
The situational judgement section has gained weight in importance over the last few years. Many medical schools now have selection algorithms that strongly prefer students who achieve a band 1 in the SJT. For example, the University of Manchester gives a solid preference for SJT bands 1 and 2, while other schools like King’s medical school give a strong preference for SJT band 1.
The most considerable confusion we see in students here is the definition of the answer options. As a medic, you will often be in situations requiring judgment, but the situational judgement test is not asking how you would deal with something in real life. Instead, it is asking what the right thing to do according to the GMC guidelines is. Think of the “Duties of a Doctor” as your SJT workbook. We help students understand exactly what makes the difference between “appropriate” and “very appropriate” in the eyes of the UCAT, or the difference between “somewhat important” and “not important”. Once those definitions have been clarified with several examples and applied to scenarios where applicants can feel sure about their answers, the SJT section becomes “easy”.
The UCAT is an aptitude test, not a knowledge test, and as such, it requires a lot of practice to master. The preparation we offer you has built-in practice questions at every stage of your UCAT prep.
While we teach you the approach and the secret tricks for each type of questions, we cover over 65 UCAT questions.
For each of them, you get a chance to do the question using the approach the tutors have just taught you and then explain your process or have the tutor explain their efficient method or trick step by step!
On top of the 65 UCAT questions built in our live UCAT course, created to demonstrate and practise critical techniques, our live course also includes a mini mock exam of 10 minutes for each UCAT section that you will do 1 hour before the end of the teaching. In the final hour, you will go through the mock, question by question, ensuring you can apply what you learned, thereby reinforcing your knowledge.
You have access to a total of 116 questions that you will do in mini mock exams during the UCAT course.
To continue learning beyond your course date, you will have access to our entire question bank boasting over 5000 questions. There will be 10,000 questions in the question by the end of summer 2021, with a few hundred being added weekly after testing.
The UCAT score you need depends primarily on applying to Medical School, Dental School or another degree that requires the UCAT. It also varies whether you are targeting UK, Australian or New Zealand schools.
Finally, the score you need depends on how well other people do in a given year since you are compared to the applicant pool of your year. As a rule of thumb, for Medicine in the UK, a score over 680 (or 2,720) will give you some options, and a score above 700 (2,800) opens the doors to most medical programmes.
Graduates applying to 4-year programmes, however, do need higher scores. For more details or the breakdown of scores required per Medical school, you can check out our blog on UCAT score cutoffs.
MAKING MEDICAL SCHOOL MORE ACCESSIBLE
A core value at theMSAG is to widen access to medicine, which we do by removing barriers.
We are proud to provide financial aid for every single one of our courses. If you require financial assistance to our UCAT courses or BMAT courses before you book your test, please email finance@theMSAG.com, and we will get back to you as soon as possible with access arrangements. All financial requests are decided on a case-by-case basis.
