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BMAT Section 2 Maths - 3 tips to boost your score · BMAT Tips Series

2017-08-10 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 8:31 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Medicine and his doctor years · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: Aimed at students, His own products discussed, Family

Recording at Ho Chi Minh City airport, Ali gives three tips for BMAT Section 2 maths: "fractions are our friends", know your times tables for fast mental maths, and guess and move on when a question will take over a minute; he adds that maths practice should be timed and learn from mistakes.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Recording at Ho Chi Minh City airport; the three tips announced

  • ★ Ali records this BMAT Section 2 maths video at Ho Chi Minh City airport, with about an hour left before his flight. — 00:00:00 · Ho Chi Minh City

00:00:29 — Tip one: fractions are our friends

  • ★★★ "Fractions are our friends" is the mantra Ali's team has taught on all its BMAT crash courses for the last five years, which he says students have found enormously helpful. — 00:00:29 · BMAT (admissions), 6med

    “fractions are our friends”

  • ★★ Ali says fractions come up throughout the BMAT paper, in Section 1 problem solving and Section 2 chemistry, physics and maths; only Section 1 critical thinking, about 17 questions, and the Section 3 writing task do without them. — 00:00:29 · BMAT (admissions)

  • ★★★ If a BMAT candidate does only one thing before the exam, Ali says improving at fractions will probably give the biggest increase in score. (hedged) — 00:00:58 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ For the BMAT Ali says candidates must add, subtract, multiply, divide and simplify fractions quickly and convert percentages and decimals into fractions, as numbers are usually easier to work with as fractions. — 00:00:58 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ In any BMAT question Ali advises converting a percentage or decimal to a fraction straight away, within reason: multiplying 0.28 by 100 needs no fraction. — 00:01:27 · BMAT (admissions)

00:01:57 — Tip two: mental maths and times tables, Speedsums

  • ★★★ For BMAT mental maths Ali urges candidates to know their times tables at least up to 12 inside out, so sums like 7 times 8 need no thought. — 00:01:57 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali says the people best at mental maths tend to do very well in the BMAT, because quick calculation saves so much time. — 00:01:57 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali says no calculator is allowed in the BMAT and almost no questions need long division or long multiplication: the sums are short enough to do in your head. — 00:02:26 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali suggests practising mental maths on Speedsums, a website made by his brother, where you do as many sums as you can in 30 seconds against a leaderboard. — 00:02:26 · Taimur Abdaal
  • ★ At school Ali and his classmates challenged their maths teachers to Brain Training on the Nintendo DS, to see who could do the most mental maths sums. — 00:02:26

00:03:13 — Tip three: guess an answer and move on; summary of the three tips

  • ★★ Ali says BMAT Section 2 has about 7 maths questions, and maybe 3 or 4 of them cannot be done in one minute by a normal person. (hedged) — 00:03:13 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali has seen students with 100% at GCSE and AS and Maths Olympiad gold medals get a low Section 2 mark, he thinks because they insist on solving maths questions and leave others blank. — 00:03:42 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali says that when he took the BMAT, and each year when he does Section 2 under timed conditions, he guesses the maths questions about shapes and leaves them to the end, as he is not good at rotating shapes in his head. — 00:04:11 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ Ali says the aim in BMAT Section 2 is to finish the paper with an answer down for all 27 questions, then come back to the hard ones if there is time. — 00:04:11 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★★ If a BMAT Section 2 question, especially in maths, takes over a minute, Ali says to guess an answer, move on and come back at the end; if it looks long within 10 seconds, not to attempt it. — 00:04:45 · BMAT (admissions)

00:05:14 — Content and practice for Section 2 maths

  • ★★★ Ali says doing many practice questions helps less for BMAT Section 2 maths than for critical thinking, as the maths questions are novel each year; practise them under strict time conditions and learn where you went wrong. — 00:05:44 · BMAT (admissions)

00:06:14 — Free questions, paid worked solutions and the bursary on BMAT Ninja

  • ★★ Ali says BMAT Ninja has about 2,000 free BMAT questions, a few hundred of them maths, covering every past paper of the last 15 years plus questions his team wrote. — 00:06:14 · BMAT Ninja (website, bmat.ninja)
  • ★★ BMAT Ninja charges 29 pounds for worked solutions to every question, written by Oxbridge medical students whom Ali's team paid thousands of pounds to write them. — 00:06:43 · BMAT Ninja (website, bmat.ninja)
  • ★★ Ali says the BMAT Ninja bursary scheme gives tens of thousands of pounds to students each year: anyone who emails gets whatever discount they want. — 00:06:43 · BMAT Ninja (website, bmat.ninja)

00:07:12 — Conclusion, next videos and sign-off

  • ★★ Ali says the next few BMAT Tips videos will cover Section 3, and after that he might go deeper into Section 1 and Section 2 topics. — 00:07:41 · BMAT (admissions)
  • ★★ As an alternative to paying for BMAT Ninja worked solutions, Ali invites viewers stuck on a BMAT question to comment under the video and promises to reply with a worked solution. — 00:07:41 · BMAT (admissions)

In the description and comments

  • ★ Ali says a score of 30 or more on Speedsums, his recommended mental maths workout, is pretty good. — video description
  • ★★ Ali says he will very soon make another video on the content of BMAT Section 2 maths, which he calls the hardest part of Section 2. — video description · BMAT (admissions)

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Central: BMAT (admissions)

Also: 6med · BMAT Ninja (website, bmat.ninja) · Brain Training · Ho Chi Minh City · Maths Olympiad · Speedsums · Taimur Abdaal

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