For any budding medical students who aspire to be fantastic doctors, the GAMSAT is a term you will hear many times in preparatory phrases. “You can’t study for it”, “It painstakingly long”, “It’s so difficult”, “I’d rather sit 50 interviews” and “ACER is out to get you and stop you from getting into medical school” are common perceptions that are shared over the enigma that this medical school requirement is.

So let’s break it down, firstly the GAMSAT or Graduate Medical School Admissions Test is a requirement for students who want to study post-graduate medicine or dentistry in most universities across Australia, Ireland and the UK. It is an exam broken down into 3 sections that is used to test an applicant’s intellectual and reasoning capabilities. Now we are going to take a moment to highlight something really important here, there is a term that we really need to hone in on and that is the word ‘reasoning’. The GAMSAT is a reasoning skills exam, and is essentially testing your reasoning skills. Now that’s all good in well, but what are reasoning skills?
Reasoning skills is a large group of abilities that enable you to break down, interpret and analyse information and further draw connections and logical deductions. Common reasoning skills include problem solving and critical thinking, and there are many, many more. We offer many reasoning skills resources and courses to help you develop and refine your skillset, to find out more feel free to book a call with our team to find out more (LINK TO BOOKING CALL WITH TEAM).

Getting back to these 3 sections, each section comprises of different materials and skillsets with the main goal of assessing your capacity for thinking critically and problem solving rather than just memorizing content. Section 1 is called ‘Reasoning in the Humanities’ and for more information please refer to [BLOG ON S1 – Deep dive into S1].

S2 is called Written Communication and involves writing 2 essays based off a set of quotes with a common theme, for more information [BLOG ON S2 – Deep dive into S2].

And the much feared Section is the Reasoning in Biological and Physical Sciences section, the longest and arguably the most arduous section. This is where the sciences come in. A combination of physics, chemistry, biology and random passages about some unique animal that you have never heard of makes up most of the content that you’ll probably see in the S3 exam, but we will never truly know what you will be tested on. But what we do know is that you will definitely be tested on your ability to use your reasoning skills, so this should be our focus, and for more information on the S3 exam check out our S3 deep dive [BLOG ON S3 – Deep dive into S3].

All in all each section presents a different set of tasks for the applicant to showcase their aptitude, knowledge and skillset.

If you would like to find out more about how to crush the GAMSAT and be on your way to becoming an fantastic doctor, come along to our [INFO SESSION LIVE WEBINAR] and check out more [SOCIALS]