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BMAT Section 1 - Everything you need to know · BMAT Tips series

2017-06-20 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 5:47 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Medicine and his doctor years · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Aimed at students, His own products discussed

Ali, a fifth-year Cambridge medical student and SixMed co-founder filming on his elective in Cambodia, explains BMAT Section 1 (35 questions in 60 minutes, critical thinking and problem solving) and says preparing for it is mostly practice, with some strategy.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Introduction: Ali, SixMed and the BMAT Tips series filmed on elective in Cambodia

  • ★★ Ali is a fifth-year medical student at Cambridge University and co-founder of SixMed, a small company running courses for medical school applicants; he has taught its BMAT Crash Course for five years. — 00:00:00 · University of Cambridge, 6med
  • ★★ Ali and his friends are on their medical elective in Cambodia and decided to make a series of videos with tips for doing well in the BMAT. — 00:00:00 · Cambodia, BMAT (admissions)

00:00:29 — What Section 1 is: timing, critical thinking and problem solving

  • ★★ BMAT Section 1 has 35 questions in 60 minutes, about one minute 42 seconds per question, so time is not usually an issue there, unlike in Section 2. — 00:00:29 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ BMAT Section 1 mixes critical thinking questions (just under half) and problem solving questions (just over half). — 00:00:29 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ BMAT Section 1 critical thinking questions are formulaic, asking for a passage's conclusion, assumption or flaw, with a specific strategy for each type, so they can be prepared for. — 00:00:58 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ BMAT Section 1 problem solving involves basic data interpretation and calculations, such as reading a table or graph and working out a percentage, and a few question types come up again and again. — 00:00:58 · BMAT (admissions)

00:01:27 — Practice is by far the most important: past BMAT and TSA Oxford papers

  • ★★★ Preparing for BMAT Section 1 is about strategy and practice, and practice is by far the more important: the best preparation is doing loads of practice questions. — 00:01:27 · BMAT (admissions)

    “practice is by far the most important”

  • ★★ In 2017 about 14 or 15 years of BMAT papers and at least 10 years of TSA Oxford papers exist, and TSA Oxford is very similar to BMAT Section 1. — 00:01:27 · BMAT (admissions)

  • ★★ For BMAT Section 1 practice, Ali advises doing all the past questions, either from the PDFs on the official Admissions Testing Service website or free on BMAT Ninja, a website he helped make, on a laptop, tablet or phone. — 00:01:56 · BMAT (admissions), Admissions Testing Service, BMAT Ninja (website, bmat.ninja)

00:02:12 — Strategy for the critical thinking questions

  • ★★ If BMAT critical thinking does not come naturally, Ali suggests going over an A-level critical thinking textbook, such as those of the OCR exam board; if it does, lots of practice is enough. — 00:02:26 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali says he will upload more tutorials on BMAT critical thinking questions in the next few weeks. — 00:02:55 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Only seven critical thinking question types come up in the BMAT each year, so a strategy for each of the seven gets almost full marks on them. — 00:02:55 · BMAT (admissions)

00:03:10 — Problem solving: times tables, estimation, fractions, decimals and percentages

  • ★★ BMAT problem solving questions vary significantly from year to year, though types such as repeating patterns and spatial awareness keep coming up. — 00:03:24 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ For BMAT problem solving, Ali advises knowing the times tables up to 12 inside out, so as not to spend ages on simple calculations. — 00:03:24 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ For BMAT problem solving, Ali advises estimating: judge from the answer options how far you can round, and remember whether you rounded up or down (an estimate of 50 against options of 48 and 52). — 00:03:53 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ For BMAT problem solving, Ali advises being able to convert easily between fractions, decimals and percentages, since most of problem solving is related to maths. — 00:04:22 · BMAT (admissions)

00:04:52 — Summary and the next videos in the series

  • ★★ Ali says the next videos of the series, over the next few days, will cover how to prepare for BMAT Sections 2 and 3, with breakdowns of each section's content. — 00:05:21 · BMAT (admissions)

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Mentioned

Central: BMAT (admissions) · BMAT Ninja (website, bmat.ninja)

Also: 6med · Admissions Testing Service · Cambodia · OCR · TSA Oxford · University of Cambridge

Only in the description or credits: Amsterdam · Hong Kong · Singapore · United Kingdom

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