My name’s Luca and you might know me as LUCAT from TikTok. I’m in the top 1% of UCAT scorers and I’m here to share my experience with you.
Let’s begin by rewinding to February 2022 when I was in Year 12. I’d decided I definitely wanted to pursue Medicine, but I was completely clueless about this ‘UCAT’ exam that was being touted in MedSoc at school.
I don’t think I even started thinking about the UCAT properly until around June, when some of my friends began to revise.
I was going on holiday in early July so I thought I’d start revising after that. My approach at this stage lacked a clear plan and direction. I purchased a UCAT book from Amazon and began to work through the tips and practice questions. No one else that I knew used any sort of book and I really do honestly feel this was a valuable purchase and the tips in here were extremely useful. Before doing any practice questions, I would re-read the tips for each section to build those foundations in my mind.
Believe it or not, I hadn’t even considered Medify or MedEntry before my friend mentioned that I could get a Medify discount through school so I thought I’d give Medify a try. I genuinely don’t know what I’d have done without it and in hindsight how did I not even consider it until late July?!
You 100% need to buy a membership with Medify or MedEntry – you don’t need both and they’re equally useful – it’s totally worth it, and if you want 10% off MedEntry, use this code: AFPD-zkv5js.
So, what turned out as an initially messy approach was actually starting to come together. I also realised I should probably book my test slot and managed to secure 14th September, although the test centre was annoyingly about 45 minutes from home because I hadn’t prepared in advance so there were no vacant slots at the test centre 10 minutes down the road.
This gave me just over 6 weeks to revise.
The following 6 weeks involved a combination of YouTube videos with tips, reading my UCAT book, using Medify (a lot), and doing tons of practice questions – initially without time constraints, then after around 1 or 2 weeks, adding some time pressure, before moving on to full mocks, ramping up my revision closer to the test date.
I never felt burnt out, only doing maybe around 2 or 3 hours on average per day, which I found to be a perfect amount. The more practice you do, the better you’ll score (generally), but you don’t want to get burnt out either. I was, after all, also trying to juggle work experience and volunteering, as well as starting school 2 weeks before my test date.
I got a variety of scores on mocks, from 2600 up to around 3000, constantly fluctuating. But by the time Exam Day was upon me, I was confident. Because I’d practiced. Like an Olympic athlete, or a musician at a concert – they’ve spent hours upon hours practicing for that one moment. There will always be the nerves and the pressure. But I’d practiced enough to think, “I’ve done 15 mocks and hundreds of practice questions – this is just a continuation of that. Just one more ‘mock’.”
Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but it does result in confidence.
I listened to some hype music on the day to get me fired up, did a couple of Verbal Reasoning warm-up questions, had a good sleep the night before, ate a good breakfast, and entered the exam hall extremely nervous, as is completely natural.
I was then of course thoroughly delighted that all the hard work paid off after the test.
I hope you learn some valuable lessons from my journey, both from what I did well and what I didn’t do so well, such as a lack of early preparation. I will continue to post here regularly with a variety of tips, techniques and insights to help you gain an advantage when it comes to this often daunting test.
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