Subtitle: Whether you are an Oxbridge applicant, a hopeful doctor, dentist, or vet, or a student eager to start at a new school, tackling an admissions test can seem like one of the most daunting aspects of your application. However, the process need not seem so frightening – and with these six tips for admissions tests, you will be able to enter your exam hall with energy, and leave with success!
Before we begin to explore how to tackle the questions themselves and how to do well at them, we should understand the rationale for the tests. More importantly, this rationale needs to be understood from two perspectives. Firstly, the academic institution’s reason for setting and using an admissions test as an element of an admissions process, and secondly, the reason that you as a student have to sit the admissions test – essentially, why you shouldn’t shy away from the prospect of sitting the test.
Let’s begin with the institutions. In my opinion, there are two main reasons why institutions (universities, schools, or other educational providers) use admissions tests. One of these is that the tests are designed to test students’ thinking skills. Now, you may wonder what on earth thinking skills are, and that would be a fair response! As a term, it almost has no meaning – surely all of us have perfect thinking skills, since we can all think? However, for the institutions that use admissions tests, ‘thinking skills’ can be broken down into problem solving and critical thinking. Problem solving, though often incorrectly only seen in scientific and mathematical terms, is the use of evidence, procedure, and creativity to find a solution to a problem. This might be a quadratic equation, but it can also be the problem of homelessness in the United Kingdom, or the construction of a new dam in China – it is most certainly not limited to the sciences! Similarly, critical thinking is often seen as a skill only for humanities students – digesting different points of view, the evidence they are based on, and the conclusions they come to, to form one’s own opinion. However, mathematicians are also critical thinkers, especially when ascertaining the preference of one mathematical method to solve a problem over another.
Now, what does all of this mean for you, the student? Essentially, admissions tests are assessing how good your problem solving and critical thinking skills are. Unlike GCSEs, A Levels, or other secondary school/high school examinations that incorporate a large element of rote learning and factual information, admissions tests are geared towards testing how you think, as opposed to knowledge and facts. At university, your learning also focuses more on building these thinking skills, instead of learning facts and knowledge; therefore, the admissions test is designed to reflect the kind of learning that you will end up doing at the end of the day.
The second institutional rationale is that admissions tests can offer a more meritocratic method of evaluating candidates, compared to the other information that they may have on hand. Though admissions tests are in no way a perfect, meritocratic system, they are undoubtedly better than comparing students’ grades, teacher feedback reports, or personal statements. At school, a student’s grades can be affected by their class size, teacher-student contact hours, teaching quality, school funding, and any other number of individual long-term factors. It is not fair to directly compare two students without contextualisation if one is in a class of forty with three hours of teaching per week and the other is in a class of seven with six hours of teaching per week. Admissions tests play a key role in this contextualisation, allowing students to compete on a (somewhat more) level playing field.
Why, then, should a student be ready and eager to sit an admissions test?
Firstly, it gives you a chance to stand out from the crowd. Especially for admissions tests that not all applicants might need to sit, it allows institutions to see your individuality and flair, which might be lost in other aspects of the admissions process. For example, if you were to apply to the undergraduate History course at the University of Cambridge, it is not a certainty that you will need to sit the History Admissions Assessment (HAA). An applicant to St John’s College would have to complete the assessment, whereas an applicant to Corpus Christi College would not. However, an applicant to Corpus Christi can only be judged on their personal statement, teacher reports, contextual data, and their submitted work, whereas the applicant to St John’s is afforded an extra chance to prove their skills as a budding historian.
Secondly, preparing for a new exam is a fantastic and valuable skill not only as a student but also a future employee. As a student, almost every new stage of your academic career will be characterised by new examination formats, and in a post-Covid world, it is more and more likely that long-established examination formats are destined to change. Furthermore, competitive employers, such as national civil services, law firms, banks, and management consulting firms, regularly use psychometric tests as an aspect of their application process; having prior experience in preparing for a new exam is a stellar way to prepare yourself for the future.
Thirdly, for most admissions tests, you don’t need to learn a significant amount of new content. Unlike school exams with a defined syllabus, admissions tests are less content-heavy and more skills-heavy. If you are aware of the way in which the test is presented, and the common ways in which examiners pose questions, you are already more than halfway there in your preparation!
Fourthly, there is no ‘right way’ to tackle the majority of admissions tests. At school, after becoming familiar with the exam syllabus, I found that examiners were exceptionally prescriptive in the way that students ought to write their responses. However, after attending innumerable admissions webinars and speaking to multiple students, who now study courses that required admissions tests, it is clear that there is no one single way to tackle an admissions test. If anything, the admissions test is a chance to display your own independent way of thinking critically or solving problems, which would be less apparent in any submitted exemplar work that you might submit to your school or university.
So, when should you start preparing? There’s no exact number, but what’s important is that you build your preparation consistently over time. I would advise against starting years in advance, but I’d also advise against starting revision in a couple of weeks. Consistency is key when preparing for an admissions test; this means making sure you stick to a clear schedule with your mentor, teacher, and other helpers. Why is this?
First, you need to prepare for the admissions test alongside your other school work – having a clear timetable or plan allows you to fit your other schoolwork and activities around a new commitment. Second, the admissions test can be quite different to the kind of exams you’ve sat at school, so you want to give yourself ample time to not only complete practice tests but also review them thoroughly, understanding where and why you went wrong. Third, on the flip side, you don’t want to start revision too late, work through your resources at a lightning pace and burn out before the actual exam. Remember: consistency is key!
Six Top Tips for Admissions Test Success
So, now that you know the institutions’ rationale and why you shouldn’t be scared of taking an admissions test, let’s turn to our six top tips for acing admissions assessments!
1. If your exam has a syllabus, know it inside out. Some assessments state that there is specific content that may be covered, such as the BioMedical Admissions Assessment (BMAT) or Engineering Admissions Assessment (EngAA), whereas others simply aim to test an applicant’s skills, such as the Thinking Skills Assessment. For assessments with a syllabus, use the resources available on the exam organiser’s website to ensure that you won’t be caught off guard during the exam.
2. Get familiar with how the exam is presented. For example, in the UK Clinical Aptitude Test (UKCAT), using keyboard shortcuts for the online test is quicker than using a mouse. For the English Literature Admissions Test (ELAT), or other source-based examinations, feel free to bend pages or rip out entire pages in the source booklet, so that you don’t need to flick through it repeatedly during the exam. Plan any essays where you can still see the exact exam question to check you haven’t missed out any words.
3. Be familiar with the specification and marking criteria, so you know how marks are divided between the exam’s sections. For example, in the Thinking Skills Assessment’s (TSA) multiple choice section, since each question is worth one mark, spend an equal time on each of them. It is difficult to finish every question in many admissions tests, and even harder to obtain full marks, so make sure you don’t agonise over a question you cannot do when you could have answered another four in the same time. If there is no negative marking, you should guess an answer for every question if you are running out of time!
4. Practice, practice, practice! For any admissions test, the best way to prepare is by learning from past exam tests, so that you can emulate the conditions of a pressurised exam environment. Once you’ve completed a test and marked it (if possible), review the mistakes you made and understand the reasoning behind the correct answer.
5. For any admissions test, especially those with essay elements, go through every past paper and make plans; you will begin to notice patterns in how questions are posed, and you will be able pre-empt the manner in which questions will be written. In this way, you can even write your own questions or ask a mentor to set some to further your practice.
6. Look beyond the specific resources for your admissions test. If you are preparing for the Law National Aptitude Test (LNAT), and want to find more multiple choice reading comprehension questions, use the TSA, the older Cambridge History Admissions Assessment, the Cambridge Law Test, and other admissions assessments that test similar skills. This also exposes you to new and interesting questions that allow you to develop more holistic skills in preparation for your exam.
By
Akshar Abhyankar, October 2021
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